The company revealed in a later filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Dow Jones had $535 million in revenue in the last quarter, more than one-third of the total for its newspaper segment. Subtracting the effect of Dow Jones, revenue at that segment fell about 25 percent  partly because of weaker currencies in Britain and Australia, where the News Corporation has many papers  compared with an 11 percent drop for the rest of the company.

The company does not disclose details on The Journal’s performance, but executives there say that like the rest of the industry, they have seen a significant decline in advertising revenue.

In another area, however, The Journal has outperformed almost all its competitors by maintaining its paid circulation of more than two million, in print and online, in the most recent reporting periods, while nearly every other major paper showed declines. Some of those subscribers receive only the online version, making The Journal one of the few papers to successfully make its online readers pay for content.

Some of that success, however, could be the result of heavy discounting, a practice that has increased since the News Corporation’s takeover. According to the most recent figures the paper filed with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, for the six months that ended Sept. 30, on an average day The Journal sold 501,000 copies at less than half the basic price, up from 420,000 in the same period in 2007, and 214,000 in 2006.

Mr. Murdoch has a well-earned reputation for making the deals that appeal to him personally, like the Dow Jones purchase, whether or not experts agree. The instinctual, from-the-gut aspect of Mr. Murdoch’s business persona was once appreciated  he was lauded when he swooped in to buy MySpace in 2005 for $580 million, outbidding Viacom  but now seems to be a mark against him in Wall Street’s eyes.

“Emotional biases and attachments play into our strategic decisions in really significant ways,” said Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. “And with Rupert Murdoch, there’s a general attachment to the newspaper business because that’s where he got his start, and he really has a feel for it, and also an attachment to the idea of owning The Wall Street Journal.”

Image Rupert Murdoch, left, and Les Hinton, who was named chief of Dow Jones & Company after its acquisition by the News Corporation. Many now believe Mr. Murdoch grossly overpaid to acquire the company. Credit... Richard Drew/Associated Press

At The Journal, the imprint of Mr. Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the managing editor he installed, is visible on the front page, where there are bigger headlines, more political coverage, and fewer of the long, sometimes whimsical yarns that were one of the paper’s signatures. They have also made articles shorter and pushed some business coverage deeper into the paper.