It’s all hands to the wheel at Sky News and The Australian as the launch date for the Australian version of the Fox Business Channel approaches.

Suddenly the reason for the paper’s raids on the Australian Financial Review and other papers is clear: many of the highly paid folk like John Durie and Jennifer Hewitt are going to multi-skill in print and TV next year.

More hirings are mooted with talk Ruth Ostrow, a former AFR writer, author, s-x counsellor and life matters columnist for The Weekend Australian‘s colour magazine, may be bound for the business pages to help write a gossip column.

Under the plan, The Australian will be producing, or helping produce, 16 hours of business TV a day, with individual programs focusing on media, resources, shares, and a program discusssing tips and recommendations.

Former editor Michael Stutchbury is overseeing it and it is becoming a grind for people on the business pages. There will be morning, afternoon and evening shows, much like you might see on CNBC with its Squark Box for instance.

There will be links to The Wall Street Journal here and around 8 hours a day of content will be sourced from the Fox Business Channel in the US, and, if Sky is clever, from Sky News in London. The Wall Street Journal is notoriously lightweight in Asia and Europe as their papers there have been cut back drastically.

That is quite apparent from The Australian‘s business pages. The strong global approach from the Financial Times has been replaced with centimetres of grey writing about the US.