Wall Street Journal

Rumors of a sixth-generation iPhone with a larger 4-inch screen are starting to gain traction, with another report coming out backing the claim. The iPhone, which has had a 3.5-inch screen since its initial launch in 2007, may finally follow the trend started by Android smartphones and increase its screen size as a way to once again wow customers with a  new feature. Apple reportedly has prepared to begin ordering larger screens for its flagship product from suppliers in South Korea and Japan.

Few things are more entertaining than watching a debating pro run rings around an opponent. Just ask the witnesses to an encounter staged Friday between Gov. Jerry Brown  and Robert Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. The event was the keynote of the Journal's annual three-day ECO:nomics conference for “green” investors. The Australian Thomson, Rupert Murdoch's handpicked Journal boss, was seemingly intent on getting Brown to endorse some of the Journal's editorial favorites, such as nuclear power and the controversial natural gas extraction technique known as fracking.

Anonymous Kollektiv, a German group claiming ties to the shadowy hacker group Anonymous, signalled out the Wall Street Journal today as the target of a crowd sourced "comments" flash mob. To be clear: No servers were brought down, the Wall Street Journal's site didn't go dark and no reporter's sensitive source list was hacked. Instead, hundreds of people posted a relatively mild paragraph in the comment section on various Facebook pages run by the Journal, suggesting that the paper was trying to stir up fear in Americans by comparing Anonymous to Al Qaeda.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal reporter with a flair for inspirational stories who produced three nonfiction bestsellers, beginning with the 2008 book "The Last Lecture" about life lessons from a dying man, was killed in a car crash Friday. He was 53. Zaslow's death was announced on the website of Detroit's Fox 2 News, where his wife, Sherry Margolis, is an anchor. Zaslow was driving on a snow-covered highway in northern Michigan when he lost control and was hit by a truck.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Friday. Van Halen played a private show for journalists and music industry insiders at a tiny club in Greenwich Village Thursday night. ( Wall Street Journal ) Will.i.am is becoming a car maker? ( Wall Street Journal ) Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, Robin Williams and Vinnie Jones star in the new trailer for... the Oscars ( Los Angeles Times ) Doctors say Nick Cannon is likely suffering from acute kidney failure, a "silent" disease.

The race is for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, but it's really a referendum on Wall Street. On one side is Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the other: incumbent Republican Scott Brown, one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from the financial industry. Brown is campaigning on traditional Republican themes of smaller government and lower taxes.

The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal claimed two high-ranking executives running the company's U.S. and British operations as Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch tried to stem the fallout from a growing crisis he had been downplaying. The resignations of longtime Murdoch intimates Les Hinton as chief executive of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of its Wall Street Journal and Rebekah Brooks as chief of News International in London came hours apart Friday. Hinton was in charge of News International and Brooks was editor of its News of the World when many of the hacking incidents are alleged to have occurred.

The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade. Every other sort — no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up — is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable. That's the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of the Murdoch meltdown now underway in London. The 80-year-old Australian-born Rupert Murdoch is the unrivaled press baron of our era, who through his acquisitive will and insatiable avarice has assembled a media empire, News Corp., that spans the globe.

The deepening scandal surrounding the London tabloid News of the World is being covered very differently by the media outlets of News Corp. — owner of the paper — and their chief rivals. The home page of the New York Times on Friday morning was splashed with stories about the phone-hacking scandal, including a piece about the arrest of a former aide to British Prime Minister David Cameron; an analysis of the Tory government's connection to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch; a profile of Rebekah Brooks, the embattled chief executive of News International, Murdoch's British publishing group; a piece about News of the World staffers; and an article about the public uproar in Britain.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Wall Street Journal is the largest U.S. newspaper. Its average weekday circulation is 2.1 million. That's according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which released newspaper circulation figures Monday for the six months through March. USA Today is at No. 2 with 1.8 million, and The New York Times is third with more than 900,000 on average Monday to Friday. The Times has the most circulation on Sundays, with 1.3 million. The circulation numbers are not comparable with the figures from last year because of new rules governing what counts as circulation.