The city’s press landscape is shifting, with the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Marcus Brauchli, resigning, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. reportedly near a deal to purchase Long Island’s Newsday from the Tribune Company for $580 million, and the New York Times, which could now face fierce competition from Mr. Murdoch on three fronts — the Journal, Newsday, and the New York Post — besieged by shareholders yesterday at its annual meeting.

“The ground is moving under journalists’ feet,” the executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Hoyt, said in reference to the industry’s money woes and the escalating newspaper war between the Times and Mr. Murdoch’s press empire. “It’s depressing and frightening on the one hand, but in some ways it’s exhilarating.”

Amid speculation that the Times — which recently announced a $335,000 loss for the first quarter, down from a $23.9 million profit one year ago — is vulnerable to a buyout, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. opened the company’s annual meeting with a strong statement to the contrary: “This company is not for sale,” he said, adding that suggestions to that effect by recent newspaper and magazine articles are “ill-informed.”

The Times’s shareholders yesterday elected a compromise slate of management-backed board candidates and two representatives from the hedge funds Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, which acquired a large stake in the company early this year and have been demanding that the newspaper giant sell assets and invest more aggressively in digital presence.

Mr. Sulzberger welcomed the new board members while also calling for the continued leadership of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that holds a controlling vote on the board. “We have no disagreement about a need for this to be a profitable company,” he said. “We have been, and remain, profitable.”

But many at the meeting expressed concerns about the paper’s financial future. Shareholder Jack Epter questioned whether the Times’s brand of journalism remains a “viable business practice.”

In response, New York Times president and CEO Janet Robinson highlighted the company’s investment in digital media and the growth of traffic to its Web site. Digital revenues accounted for 10% of total revenues in 2007, up from 8% in 2006. “We are in the news and information business,” she said. “We don’t consider ourselves just a newspaper company anymore.”

Still, Mr. Epter, a Queens resident, remained skeptical. “The Times wants to produce quality journalism — I don’t think the market will pay for that,” he said after the meeting, comparing Mr. Sulzberger’s optimism to a pre-drowning George Clooney in the movie “The Perfect Storm.” “I think it’s delusional,” he said.

As for the management shake-up at the Journal, Mr. Brauchli will vacate his post as managing editor but remain a consultant to News Corp., which purchased the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, for $5.1 billion four months ago, the company announced.

“Following the change in ownership of Dow Jones and the Journal, I have concluded the time is right to consider new career possibilities,” said Mr. Brauchli, a former foreign correspondent who came to Dow Jones in 1984. He became managing editor last May.

The move was widely viewed as the result of tension between the long-form, narrative journalism style that the Journal has always been known for, and that Mr. Brauchli has championed, and Mr. Murdoch’s vision for the paper, the assistant managing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, said.

“Marcus was seen as a guy from the old school,” said Mr. Starkman, who worked for eight years as a reporter at the Journal. “He was trying to manage change and be open to new ideas, but he was also the lynchpin in defending the paper’s core values and DNA.”

Since News Corp. took over the Journal, the character of the paper has begun to change, with the front page more crowded with “commodity-type” news, Mr. Starkman said. “It became clear after News Corp. bought the paper that the pressure for change was even greater than was expected,” he said. “You could sort of see it evolving just by reading the paper.”

In the wake of Mr. Brauchli’s departure, “the world of journalism to me just got less distinctive, less quirky, less original, less investigative,” he said.

In recent months, Mr. Murdoch has made clear his intention to whittle away at the Times’s advertising and circulation base, and the acquisition of Newsday would likely aid him on that front, Mr. Hoyt said. “It gives Murdoch tremendous power in New York,” he said.