Robert William Thomson (journalist)
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- Robert William Thomson is also a Scottish inventor.
Robert William Thomson is an Australian journalist and editor of The Times newspaper.
Thomson was a journalist for The Herald-Sun in Melbourne from 1979 until 1983, when he became a senior feature writer for The Sydney Morning Herald. After serving as the Tokyo correspondent of the US Financial Times he became its managing editor in September 1998. In February 2002, he was appointed by media magnate Rupert Murdoch to be the editor of The Times in London.
Under Thomson, The Times has paid more attention to international politics, financial markets and especially sport. Its coverage of the arts, literature and British culture has, however, been increasingly cursory. Following the lead of another British paper, The Independent, News International has also launched a tabloid version of the broadsheet Times, on which the company's efforts were increasingly focused, and since 1 November 2004 onwards The Times has only been available in tabloid form. Although the two papers purported to be the same during the transitional period (November 2003 - October 2004), the content was actually very different in detail, because stories and pages were edited separately for each. This distinguished it from The Independent, which published exactly the same content in its tabloid and broadsheet edition during its transitional period (September 2003 - May 2004).
During the transitional period, Thomson had to make several staff redundant, including senior leader writers, owing to the need to find more money to fund the compact version.