Robert Thompson is the editor of the London Times.
Rupert Murdoch hired him when he was in New York working for the Financial Times.
The FT’s circulation in the U.S. was just 45,000 copies a day.
By 2002, U.S. circulation had increased to 150,000 copies.
He knows business media.
And he is the key editor behind the Murdoch bid for Dow Jones.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile of Robert Thompson that includes these paragraphs:
Mr. Thomson and Mr. Murdoch have an unusually close relationship, said people who know them both.
They share Australian roots and a birthday (March 11, 30 years apart).
Both married women from China and have young children. Wendi Murdoch and Mr. Thomson’s wife, Wang Ping, get along well and speak Mandarin to each other, say people who know them.
The two families have vacationed together.
Kim Fletcher, a British media commentator and former editor of the Independent on Sunday newspaper, said that sharing vacations represents an “astonishing closeness” between the newspaper owner and his editor.
“When Thomson was appointed [Times editor], he was seen to have come from nowhere because he wasn’t on the general newspaper scene — he was from a business-newspaper background,” Mr. Fletcher said.
Mr. Thomson grew up in a working-class family in the Australian bush and got his first full-time job at age 17 in 1979 at Melbourne’s Herald, an evening paper once edited by Mr. Murdoch’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch.
Mr. Thomson missed out on a position as a trainee journalist and became an errand boy instead.
A year later, he became a reporter.
At night, he studied for his journalism degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
In the early 1980s, he moved to the Sydney Morning Herald. Through a sharing arrangement with the Financial Times, the paper sent him to Beijing as a reporter.
In 1989, Mr. Thomson covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests by the Chinese army. He was in the square when a group of soldiers started beating up another reporter, Jonathan Mirsky of Britain’s Observer newspaper.
Mr. Thomson helped pull away Mr. Mirsky, both men recall.
(…) In 2004, the Times had an $89-million loss, according to a person familiar with its accounts. Next year, the paper is expected to make a profit, this person said.
“Rupert Murdoch gets little credit for seeing the Times through the difficult years,” Mr. Thomson said in an email. “It’s fair to say that we are famous for being a not-for-profit” organization, he jokes.
The Times has lost money for most of the time it has been owned by Mr. Murdoch, according to several former editors.
Tall, thin and with a slight stoop because of a back problem, Mr. Thomson is approachable and rarely shows anger, said people who have worked with him.
With a soft voice and an eccentric style of dress — he is fond of thin ties — he stood out in the newsroom, said people who have worked with him.
Not a bad editor.
For the old Times of London…
Or for the new Wall Street Journal.
