Alan Murray is leaving the Wall Street Journal, where he has been since 1983, to become president of the Pew Research Center. Murray  came to the Journal as a reporter covering economic policy, and worked his way up from there.

Murray most recently served as the paper’s online deputy managing editor and executive editor. Raju Narisetti will succeed him.

“Digital is a land of many metrics, and the metrics during Alan’s reign have been extraordinary,” said Robert Thomson, Dow Jones’ editor-in-chief and the Journal’s managing editor, in a memo. “Our audience has expanded fourfold during the past five years and almost 65 million people visit our sites each month. Each of those individuals owes Alan a small word of thanks, but no words can capture the gratitude I have for his enduring contribution to the Journal and to journalism.”

The full memo from Thomson is below.

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When News Corp. splits its companies into two segments — entertainment and publishing — it is expected that current Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Robert Thomson will head up the latter. With Thompson moving on, the Journal’s newsroom, according to The Huffington Post, is “buzzing” about who will replace him.

Here are all the people being considered for the top spot; or to replace the deputy editor-in-chief, Gerald Baker, should he get the nod:

• Gerard Baker. He is naturally the lead candidate, but some at the Journal aren’t too happy about that. In fact, in 2011, one staffer said it would be “Horrifying” if Baker got the job. That might be a tad dramatic, but hey, nothing fuels a rumor like an overreaction.
• Alan Murray. The deputy managing editor, executive editor of online is close behind Baker for grabbing Thomson’s role.
• Michael Miller. Another deputy managing editor.
• Matt Murray. International and investing editor.
• Almar Latour. Editor-in-chief of the Journal’s Asia edition.

The Wall Street Journal has launched a mobile news video site called WorldStream. The site features video footage that is shot on smartphones by reporters from all of the Dow Jones’ brands. WorldStream is overseen by WSJ editorial video director Shawn Bender and real-time video deputy Mark Scheffler.

Each video is posted within minutes after a reporter submits it to an editor, making the site an almost live feed for news.

“Our video viewership has more than doubled in the past six months to over 20 million streams, and the creation of this video blog is a milestone in the expansion of video at the Journal,” said Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor of WSJ.com.

The Wall Street Journal has launched a new interactive video application for the iPad, Internet-ready TVs and set-top boxes. Titled “WSJ Live,” the app brings up to four hours of live TV from the Journal to the aforementioned products each business day. The available content includes breaking news, exclusive interviews and seven half-hour shows.

“WSJ Live brings our existing — and growing — stable of video programming to an unprecedented level of distribution and exposure,” explained Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Online, for the paper. “Because of the broad scope, we have more opportunities to showcase our journalism by bringing breaking news, analysis and insight closer to our current readers while simultaneously tapping into new audiences.”

The app is free, so you really don’t have much to lose. Eventually WSJ Live is going to add Hulu and Hulu Plus, so after watching stock tips, you can turn on the latest episode of “Glee.” Or vice versa if you can’t wait for your dose of teen karaoke.

As the fallout from the phone hacking scandal continues, The Wall Street Journal has desperately tried to maintain its autonomy from News Corporation. Unfortunately, when editorials that read like a press release are published within its pages, it makes things a little difficult for everyone there to do that (even if they don’t like the editorial).

Alan Murray, the paper’s Deputy Managing Editor, and a few other Journal staffers spoke to WWD today and expressed their frustration with the situation. Murray defended the Journal, even adding that Rupert Murdoch has made it a better place:

We do feel we are suffering from guilt by association. My feeling, and that of many here, is that this is in many ways a better paper than it was four years ago, and Rupert Murdoch and Les Hinton both deserve great credit for investing in us and supporting and encouraging good journalism here.

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Photo: (left to right) Chris Anderson, Gary Hoenig, John Sargent, Alan Murray

Last night’s discussion, Free AND Paid Content: Business Models That Work, hinged on whether consumers of news and books should and will pay for content online. But it became a tense intellectual slugging match between John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishing, and moderator Chris Anderson, most recently the author of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

“We have not grown up in an atmosphere of free books” — Sargent

Anderson contended that free digital copies could bring books back into the “cultural conversation,” while Sargent held steady as the consistent voice of dissent, expressing a grim forecast for the publishing industry and noting that it’s “hard to imagine books as a growth business.” Not even “freemiums” will work, Sargent said, warning of the “danger of the experimental stage,” in which giving away free books may increase sales the first year and even the second, only to see them disappear completely long-term. “It’s early,” he said. “We need a device or two and we definitely need a new screen.”

Anderson and Sargent were joined by panelists Gary Hoenig, ESPN Publishing’s general manager and editorial director, and Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive online editor of the Wall Street Journal, each of whom provided moderate voices amid Anderson’s proselytizing and Sargent’s foreboding.

Anderson moderated the panel hosted in the Condé Nast building where he works as editor-in-chief of Wired. As the group’s ostensible mediator, he served more as an antagonist to the three panelists, especially Sargent, highlighting the fact that all are generals in a war that seeks to have readers pay for a product that, in many cases, they can get for free.

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Today, we are staking out Wired magazine’s Disruptive By Design business conference. Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson (left) opened the day with a discussion about his upcoming book: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” and of course, he eventually started to talk about how the media has been affected by the rise of the Internet.

The Internet allows content to be published for little to no cost to the content provider, so the information can be provided for free. But what newspapers and magazines have failed to do so far is effectively monetize content provided online.

In his talk this morning, Anderson suggested that instead of looking at content as free versus paid, we should consider it as “freemium.” Following the model of The Wall Street Journal, newspapers can provide their exclusive stories and most popular content for free, while niche content can be placed behind a pay wall.

“People are more willing to pay for niche content because they realize how specialized it is,” Anderson said. Following this model, newspapers can hope to draw in readers who are not willing to pay for content and then convert some of them into paying consumers.

We caught up with Anderson to ask him if he saw his own magazine possibly taking on this model and what he sees as the future of newspapers and magazines.

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Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson sent two memos to staff today announcing the appointments of two top editors at the U.S. and Asia editions of the financial paper.

Deborah Brewster, formerly of the Financial Times will take the position of deputy managing editor of the Journal early next month, Thomson said.

“She played a key role in the rapid expansion of the US Edition of the Financial Times, where she was instrumental in developing FT.com, created the successful Global Investing section, and [was] largely responsible for ensuring that the FT had a talented and diverse staff,” Thomson added.

Brewster will be in charge of training and hiring programs for the Journal and will oversee the graphics department. Over the course of her 20-year business journalism career she worked for Australian pubs The Australian and The Age before joining FT in 1999.

Thomson today also announced the appointment of Almar Latour as editor-in-chief, Asia, for the Journal. Latour has a long history with the paper and most recently worked with deputy managing editor Alan Murray to develop WSJ.com, Thomson said.

In his new role, Latour will over see the print version of the Journal in Asia (which recently expanded to India) and work on expanding the paper’s digital presence there. Since the Journal has made it a priority to increase its reach in the growing Asian market, Latour will have his work cut out for him.

“Our Chinese-language site has quadrupled its audience over the past 18 months, while our Japanese-language site is due to be launched in the autumn and we are in the midst of developing new editorial content for mobile phones in India,” Thomson explained.

Full memos after the jump

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We interrupt coverage of Mediabistro Circus to bring you news of another media panel going on at New York University today as part of New York’s Internet Week.

I Want Media hosted a panel earlier today featuring former Star magazine editor Bonnie Fuller, Gawker chief Nick Denton, The Wall Street Journal‘s deputy managing editor Alan Murray (left), Craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The discussion, which was supposed to center around the future of the media industry, centered mostly on Twitter. The panelists agreed that they rely on the microblogging site for a lot of their news aggregation.

“I get all of my Wall Street Journal stories from you,” Denton told Murray.

But is Twitter the future of media? Read on to find out what the panelists said.

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Editor & Publisher has published Nielsen Online’s monthly unique visitor tally for newspaper websites in April and they have a few surprises. First, there was a huge jump for The Wall Street Journal (ranked number two on the list) while hits at The New York Times‘ Web site were down by 8 percent compared to last year.

Despite the dip in visitors last month, the Times‘ site remains number one among online newspapers. Still, a Times spokeswoman told E&P that the paper is looking into Nielsen’s numbers because they “believe their data is in error.”

However, over at the Journal, Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray proudly proclaimed WSJ.com’s record traffic — 12.4 million unique visitors last month, up 160 percent from last year — in an internal memo sent to staff on Friday.

“No other major news site is growing at anything remotely close to that pace,” the memo said.

Nielsen’s top 30 U.S. newspaper Web sites and their April 2009 unique visitor numbers after the jump

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