PHOENIX — Finally, he acknowledges his new neighbor. But Arthur Sulzberger Jr. won’t be inviting Rupert Murdoch out for dinner anytime soon.

When The Wall Street Journal opens its New York section next month the Times will be ready to compete, said Sulzberger, New York Times Co. Chairman, at a convention of journalists Saturday. Before that, Times Co. executives had said very little about their new competitor beyond a veiled advertising campaign against the Journal.

“We don’t shy away from competition,” Sulzberger said in a keynote speech at the annual convention of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix.

Murdoch’s News Corp. is spending about $15 million on the expansion into the New York Market, where the Times courts high-end readers and advertisers. The Journal reporters will cover local politics, business, culture and sports.

“We believe that in its pursuit of journalism prizes and a national reputation, a certain other New York daily has essentially stopped covering the city the way it once did,” Murdoch said in speech earlier this month.

But Sulzberger said that the Journal may be trying to take on too much: changing its coverage and innovating digitally when the Times and others are focusing on digital innovation. “This is no small feat,” he said.

Some have criticized the Times for cutting back its Metro staff in recent years. After the speech Sulzberger said that the fewer number of employees is not a fair indication of its local strength. “That’s baloney,” he said. Sulzberger pointed out that his reporters from other sections of the paper contribute to local coverage, including some from the sports and culture sections. “When you add them all up, it’s huge,” he said.

The Times launched this week a new marketing campaign for advertisers, including collateral materials that directly target the Journal. One promotional piece compares the two papers’ readership among “arts enthusiasts” “business professionals” and women. Previously, the Times had run similar ads but had not mentioned the Journal by name.

During his speech Sulzberger took some digs at Murdoch for criticizing Google. “I am not that other guy who rails against Google,” he said, while circling a finger around his ear like Murdoch’s crazy for doing so. Fighting with Google is like fighting oxygen, said Sulzberger, who said media companies should work with Google in the new media “ecosystem.”

For his part, Murdoch has run ads in his paper that say “Stay ahead of the times” and tout the Journal‘s “unprecedented investments in product innovation.”

Since he bought the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Co., for $5.6 billion in 2007, Murdoch has been developing a more general-news oriented paper. Some anticipate that the New York section will resemble the New York Sun, the sophisticated, politically conservative daily that shut down in 2008.

Sulzberger said that when he was an AP reporter in London and Murdoch purchased the Times of London he saw other publishers change their coverage to adapt, but ended up hurting themselves. “We’re going to stay with what we’re good at,” he said.

After the speech he added: “We’re much more committed, we’ve been there longer, it’s what we do.”