If Zannino doesn’t play well with the Journal rank and file, that’s because he hasn’t tried very hard. As he presided over hundreds of firings, he preserved his own big raise, a $350,000 bonus, and a $1.4 million grant in stock options. Zannino gets tagged for all kinds of other cutbacks, like killing the full-service company cafeteria.

In recent years, Dow Jones management has tended to blame shortcomings on economic forces beyond its control. Zannino expends a fair deal of energy cheerleading, but he will occasionally eschew this style and betray a sense of honest urgency. When I mentioned Telerate, he replied, “That was then; this is now.” He could have left it there, but he continued. “By and large, the strategy was right, and we could have executed better.” An implicit shot at Peter Kann, his boss, the man in charge of execution.

“You’re not dealing with a callous person,” says one of Karen House’s friends, “just someone lacking self-awareness.”

House and Zannino regard one another with what some of their fellow executives describe as mutual contempt. While House shares the newsroom critique of Zannino—that he doesn’t read and doesn’t understand journalism—Zannino considers House an abominable manager. This animosity doesn’t often spill over into the public realm, but it did once. Two years ago, Peter Kann invited retired IBM chair Lou Gerstner, an Ur–corporate guru, to dinner with his top managers. According to two accounts of the evening, a substantive disagreement between the two aspirants escalated into a startlingly heated argument. After the incident, Kann demanded they never repeat that night’s performance.

In the race for Steiger’s job, a similar dynamic prevails. Global-news editor Marcus Brauchli, who has served in Europe and Asia, positioned himself as the anti–Joanne Lipman, not so diplomatically decrying her superficiality to reporters. A three-way race, also including Adler, had featured aggressive campaigning, with contenders jockeying for office space close to Steiger and attempting to prove their superior bona fides through unusually copious comments on articles in the story queue.

But the field has thinned considerably in the past several months. Since Karen House hasn’t held candid discussions about succession with any of the candidates, Adler and Lipman have fled the paper for other jobs, preferring known opportunities to a drawn-out battle. “The only certainty at Dow Jones is uncertainty,” one editor quips. The cutbacks of the past five years have eroded the strong loyalty that once kept the paper’s stars from entertaining outside offers. Compared with Dow Jones’s tight-fistedness, other media companies suddenly seem like editorial wonderlands, places where editors don’t need to constantly worry about how much lunch costs. So when Condé Nast comes offering approximately $100 million to develop a new magazine, the decision to go isn’t very torturous.  

According to conventional wisdom, the departures of Lipman and Adler have cleared Brauchli’s route to the grand prize. Only dark-horse contenders, like former Washington bureau chief Alan Murray and Barron’s editor Ed Finn, remain. On the other hand, it’s also possible that Lipman or one of the émigrés could make a triumphant return to Liberty Street after proving themselves in the wider world. Ron Suskind, a former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the paper, raises the possibility that Ingrassia, for instance, could return. “The subject of who Larry will steal next is a subject of regular conversation at the Journal,” says Suskind. “Those conversations raise your profile and bring you into the race.”

Karen House will have more say than anyone in choosing the ultimate winner, and her close colleagues say that she doesn’t like having her options narrowed for her. So the more the chattering classes fixate on one candidate or another, the likelier it is she could make a truly unexpected choice.

Even if the “Weekend Edition” succeeds, if ads from Coach and Williams Sonoma come rolling in, it still might not compensate for continued slack weekday sales. As newspaper analyst John Morton warns, the weekend paper might even cannibalize weekday advertising. “There’s some danger that the current stable of consumer advertising will just spread their advertising out over another day rather than add to it,” he says. If the Saturday paper doesn’t make the Journal more profitable, then what?

Ever since 1997, when investor Michael Price tried to entice Dow Jones and the Washington Post into a merger, rumors have proliferated about the company’s imminent sale. But until recently, the Bancrofts never gave any indication that they intended to part with the company. “Overtures [to purchase the company] have been politely rebuffed,” says Hammer, the family lawyer who once sat on the Dow Jones board. They view the paper as “a family trust” and a source of prestige, as well as a dividend factory.

In the past few months, however, the Bancrofts’ sentiment may have changed. Hammer told Fortune in May that a substantial offer could spur a sale. For all its troubles, the Journal remains quite a prize, and there are many potential suitors who could fire up a bidding war. Michael Bloomberg has salivated over Dow Jones in the past, although his company likely won’t make a major move as long as he’s ruling in absentia. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. doesn’t have such restraints. Two years ago, The New Yorker reported that he sent the Bancrofts a letter, via Hammer, announcing the New York Times Company’s interest in a deal. Hammer and Kann rebuffed Sulzberger without even asking the Bancrofts first. But nobody really quibbled with the logic of the rejection. “The Bancrofts worry that the Wall Street Journal and the Times are natural competitors,” says a source close to the family. They would never abide the two Gray Ladies shacking up together, because they can’t see the Journal receiving the attention it deserves within the Times company.