Something is afoot at News Corp Australia… and for the moment we’re going to have to speculate (writes Peter Coleman).

It’s been a somewhat tumultuous week, starting with the fuss about the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s screaming ‘Get this mob out’ front page, and culminating with this morning’s announcement that Kim Williams has resigned.

No reasons have yet been given, so we don’t know whether Williams (pictured) – whose News career dates to Fox Studios Australia – is unwell, or whether it’s just not fun any more.

What is certain is that a tide of change is sweeping though News, which has new global management following its separation from what is now Twenty-First Century Fox and what looks like a new editorial attitude.

The appointment of Julian Clarke as Williams’ successor is also unlikely to be a permanent one, and follows core changes at News Victorian stronghold, the Herald & Weekly Times.

In June, Clarke and two other long-serving members – Reg Cordina and Rupert Murdoch’s sister Janet Calvert-Jones – resigned from the HWT board, while Calvert-Jones’ daughter Penny Fowler, was named as its new chairman.

The smaller team had comprised – until any changes prompted by this morning’s announcement – Fowler, Williams, Jeremy Harris and Peter Blunden. Blunden had succeeded Clarke as managing director of HWT in 2007, not long after he had somewhat famously, been replaced as editor-in-chief by Bruce Guthrie. Clarke moved up then to succeed Calvert-Jones as chairman of the Melbourne-headquartered operation, which publishes the Herald-Sun.

Clarke had served 16 years as head of HWT, having started a newspaper career with suburban group Standard Newspapers in 1960. From which you’ll gather that he is somewhat past the ‘normal’ retirement age of 65.

Speculation now surrounds the possibility that a ‘placeholder’ role will allow Murdoch’s son Lachlan – currently chairman of Ten and owner of DMG Radio – to return and lead the company.

In the context of his involvement – with James Packer – in the recent Pamela Williams book launch and the comments made then, it’s an interesting prospect… especially with cousins Penny Fowler and Lachlan Murdoch in such positions of power.

Meanwhile some of the jolly japes emanating from Holt Street left me wondering whether the Bash Street kids had taken over… especially given the fun editors of News tabloids around Australia seem to be having since Col Allan hit town.

Remember the Bash Street Gang… and their comic antihero Dennis the Menace, who thumbed his nose at Charles and Camilla a few weeks back while lined up at the opening of DC Thomson’s new Dundee, Scotland, printing plant… and had the wife of the heir to the English throne return the compliment.

The fun’s in seeing what you can get away with, and News Corp – the new publishing-focussed business in what was Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment-dominated empire – is under new management.

Changes across News Australian newspapers – which go far beyond the typographical tweaks which are presumably the complement of a change of editorial system – seem to see editors pushing publishing back to what it was in News Limited’s early days.

Australia’s general election is the answer to a circulation manager’s prayer – ‘the front page that comes around every three years,’ one title bragged of the efforts of the Telegraph and its stablemates – but comes at a time when the reading public is better aware than ever of the sort of japes Murdoch’s gang have been known to get up to, thanks to Leveson and others.

Editors at News have said for years that they’re not influenced by the thoughts of chairman Rupert, but they’re equally aware of the career impact of thinking for themselves. Can we mention Bruce Guthrie’s name again?

And after following Murdoch’s line on Australian politics – expressed these days in Twitter as well as other forms – another great opportunity to push boundaries presented itself in Brisbane soon after, when the fury of a woman scorned prompted the one-word ‘Plonker’ across page one of the Courier-Mail, together with a handful of mostly-obliterated snaps. Was one perhaps the image of the state ethics chair’s appendage, “plonked in a glass of red wine”, the brief story below said his former lover had given to the parliamentary speaker?

With the collateral splashed with the Courier-Mail masthead, it made a great promo on television news that night and as Murdoch as much as any, will know, no-one ever lost money underestimating public taste. He should also know that it’s far easier to lose a reader than to win one back.

That Courier-Mail issue – with its gratuitous ‘Four celebs who have a love child’ filler panel in page 18 – was also the one targetted at schoolchildren with its Headstart young readers pullout.

If my kids were still of school age, I’m not sure I’d want it in the house… and I’m still not. The reality of course, is that in a ‘one publisher town’ Queensland newspaper readers don’t have the choice enjoyed by those in London, where The Sun and the disgraced, sacrificed and replaced News of the World have been published. It’s a responsibility the paper – known as a ‘broadloid’ even when its page format was longer – chooses to ignore.

The issue prompted those thoughts of Dennis the Menace, above, but left me thinking editors weren’t thumbing their nose at readers, but smearing a soiled finger across the front page.

Much has been made of support for press freedom, and we respect that, and Murdoch’s commitment to print journalism. It would be good however, to think that changes made in Melbourne recently – and those perhaps to come with the Australian chief executive position – might prompt a rethink about where publishing standards got to this week.