Will Murdoch boost morale and launch the Sun on Sunday?

Editor's update: Since this article was posted, Rupert Murdoch has told staff at the Sun that the recent arrests of journalists was "a source of great pain for me" but he stressed that illegal activity could not be tolerated. He announced that the Sun on Sunday would be launched "very soon".

AS RUPERT MURDOCH prepares to address the staff of his crisis-hit Sun newspaper today, there are rumours circulating at the Wapping offices that he might be bold and take the chance to announce the launch date for a new Sun on Sunday newspaper, to replace the defunct News of the World.

According to The Guardian, he was shown dummies for the proposed new paper during a visit to London last month. "This would be vintage Murdoch if he did something like announce the Sun on Sunday," said an insider. "He has to do something to boost morale, and this would show his commitment to the paper and give staff fresh impetus."

Whatever he is planning, he's had the time to think about it. We were told last Sunday that he would be flying in to deal with the crisis at the tabloid following Saturday's arrests of five more journalists, and it took him four days to summon his private jet and fly into Luton last night.

He arrives to find no let-up in the face-off between the staff of the Sun and the members of the Management and Standards Committee. This is the body set up by News Corp to provide the Metropolitan Police with the information they need to investigate alleged illegal payments to police officers and other public officials. As we reported earlier this week, some of those payments are said to be so high – more than £10,000 a year – that some public servants were on virtual retainers for story tip-offs.

Murdoch was bound to help the police with their inquiries following the phone-hacking scandal – not least because he faces the risk of prosecution in America under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which makes it illegal to bribe officials in foreign countries. If News Corp is to avoid such charges, it is essential that its executives are not seen to be culpable of "willful blindness" - doing nothing to correct a problem having discovered it exists.

What has angered the Sun staff is that in the rush to help the Met with their inquiries, reporters and their confidential sources have been hung out to dry. Nine current and former staff have so far been arrested - and there are fears they won't be the last with hundreds of thousands of internal emails and invoices still to be examined by the MSC.

"The management has done nothing to protect us from this appalling invasion of our work," Reuters reports one Wapping journalist as saying. "Nobody has said, 'You can't do this to journalists.' A lot of people are angry."

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has been urging the Sun journalists to use the courts to defend their rights, told Reuters: "Every media organisation has a duty to assist the police in uncovering serious crime. But it also has a fundamental duty to protect the sources that have been cultivated by its journalists under a promise of anonymity."

The rumours of the Sun on Sunday launch could just be wishful thinking. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Murdoch could announce quite the opposite – the sale of the paper. That would please institutional shareholders and many other executives at News Corp, where Rupert's love of print journalism is seen to be holding the company back.

Were he to be persuaded to give up on print – at least on this side of the Atlantic – there is a fascinating option open to him, put forward earlier this week by the journalist Michael Wolff, author of the 2008 biography of Rupert, The Man Who Owns the News.

Writing in the Guardian, Wolff's proposal was simple: "Sell the Sun. Use the proceeds (I'd guess £500m to £700m) to endow an independent trust that will run the Times and Sunday Times, hence ensuring another generation of quality newspapers in Britain...

"This would certainly take the enmity, if not the air, out of the ongoing investigations; it might even allow the company to keep running BSkyB (though I wouldn't necessarily count on it); it might help save his son [James]; and it would restore corporate focus to all the assets that are trouble-free and, a good many of them, growing nicely.

"And what's more, finally, it would make his father, the late Sir Keith, proud."

As the New York Times reports, "the Murdoch trip seems likely to be far from routine". What will be interesting today is to see how the news emerges from Wapping. According to Michael Wolff's recent tweets, there is concern in the Murdoch camp that Sun journalists don't live-tweet from their meeting with the boss. On the other hand, Murdoch himself has become a keen tweeter in recent weeks – perhaps he just wants to be first with the news. ·