Robert James Thomson (born
11 March 1961) is an
Australian journalist and Editor in Chief of the
Wall Street Journal. He is former
editor of
The Times newspaper in
London,
England. On May 20, 2008 News Corp. Chairman
Rupert Murdoch named Thomson as the paper's new managing editor, succeeding Marcus Brauchli. Thomson holds both the managing editor position as well as the position of editor-in-chief of Dow Jones, the News Corp. unit that publishes the Journal, according to News Corp.
[1]Thomson was born in Melbourne, Australia and studied at Christian Brothers College, St Kilda and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology[2]. He started as a journalist in 1979, when he joined The Herald in Melbourne, working as 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 was nominated by the paper for Australian Journalist of the Year for his work examining the country’s judiciary.
Robert Thomson became Editor of the US edition of the Financial Times in the summer of 1998, taking editorial responsibility for the FT Group's ambitious drive into the US market, where the newspaper's circulation trebled in four years. He was named US Business Journalist of the Year in 2001 by the influential trade journal TJFR/NewsBios.
He was in the running to become editor of the Financial Times when Richard Lambert stepped down from the role in 2001, but came second to Andrew Gowers. Soon afterwards he left to become editor of The Times, appointed editor of The Times on 6 March 2002.
