Is there another departure from the lounge of Glen Burge, the editor of The Australian Financial Review? Is the high level defector from the AFR now bound for The Australian?

Chris Merritt, the man who built the AFR’s impressive (in editorial and commercial terms) Friday legal affairs pages and boosted its coverage of legal matters on other days, is said to be on his way from the Fairfax Building in Darling Park to Holt Street and the pages of Chris Mitchell and the Oz.

The AFR has someone from the Melbourne bureau ready to fill the gap, but the parting apparently hasn’t been smooth.

Mitchell and Merritt go back two decades to when they worked as sub-editors on the AFR when it was at Jones Street in Sydney.