Robert Thomson Biography

Robert Thomson is the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. As the senior news executive at Dow Jones, Mr. Thomson directs the news operations of the Journal, WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com and Dow Jones Newswires.

Before joining Dow Jones in December 2007, Mr. Thomson was editor of The Times of London where he presided over a significant expansion of its readership in print and on the Web – the audience of the Times Online grew from less than 1 million monthly to almost 13 million during his editorship. Prior to that, he was editor of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times taking prime editorial responsibility for the FT Group’s ambitious drive into the U.S. market, where the newspaper trebled its sales to almost 150,000. For his work in building the FT’s operations, in print and online, he was named as U.S. Business Journalist of the Year in 2001 by the influential trade journal TJFR.

Before arriving in New York for the Financial Times, Mr. Thomson was editor of the Weekend FT and assistant editor of the Financial Times. He orchestrated a successful redesign of the Weekend FT in late 1996, and that edition became the fastest-growing newspaper in the U.K. market during 1997. He also oversaw the evolution of the occasional “How to Spend It” magazine into an award-winning monthly. From 1994 to 1996, he was the FT’s foreign news editor in London, overseeing the paper’s extensive network of correspondents. Thomson had been a correspondent himself in Tokyo (1989-1994), where he witnessed the rise and fall of the “bubble economy,” and in Beijing (1985-1989), where he reported on the country’s economic and social reforms, and the crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Thomson has been a journalist since early 1979, when he joined The Herald in Melbourne, working as a copyboy and a finance and general affairs reporter before becoming the paper’s Sydney correspondent. In 1983, he was hired by the Sydney Morning Herald as a senior feature writer and, two years later, was appointed to a Beijing bureau then shared by the Sydney paper and the Financial Times.

He is the author of The Judges: A Portrait of the Australian Judiciary (Allen & Unwin) and co-author of The Chinese Army (Weldon Owen). He edited a collection of satirical writing titled True Fiction (Penguin Books).

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