WORLD: MEDIA ANALYSIS - The News and Post treat New York to a UK-style tabloid war.(newspaper owners)

Who'll be the winner as New York's tabloids start a fierce battle, Matthew Cowen asks.

The idea of newspaper owners locked in Citizen Kane-style circulation contests seems anachronistic. Yet, the good citizens of New York are being treated to an old-fashioned battle between two genuine publishing heavyweights.

'It's shaping up to be the last great newspaper war in the US,' Rupert Newton, a partner at Michaelides & Bednash's New York office, says. 'It's two old newspaper families and it's about to really kick off. There's something almost Byzantine about it.'

In the left-hand corner stands Mort Zuckerman, the respected publisher of the New York Daily News, for years the undisputed leader of the city's tabloid market. On the right (pretty far right, in fact) stands a challenger who needs little introduction: Rupert Murdoch. Or, more precisely, his son Lachlan, the publisher of the New York Post, …