Robert Thomson and the price of a story

Before the arguments with Google, before the agreement with OpenAI, there were sugar and copper prices. Robert Thomson typed them into the business pages at The Herald in Melbourne. He joined the newspaper in 1979 as a copyboy, a job title with little glamour and considerable proximity to people who knew what they were doing.

He would later remember colleagues who respected the work without becoming too impressed by themselves. There were practical boundaries, too: leave the pneumatic tubes alone and avoid irritating the men assembling the pages. The newspaper had machinery, deadlines and a hierarchy. A young arrival could learn quite a lot by listening.

Thomson did not arrive with an elaborate childhood plan to become an editor. He has said he was better with numbers than words. In his eventual career, both would be useful. A story needs someone to write it, someone to read it and, rather inconveniently, someone to pay for it.

That last person has become a central preoccupation of his working life. As News Corp’s chief executive, Thomson has spent years arguing with the technology industry about the value of journalism. His position is easy to understand, even when the negotiations are difficult: a business that benefits from reporting should recognise the cost of producing it.

A country town, then two capitals

Born in Torrumbarry, near Echuca in Victoria, in 1961, Thomson grew into a career that took him far beyond Australia. He attended Christian Brothers College in St Kilda and studied journalism at RMIT. In 2010, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in communications. The copyboy had acquired an academic title along the way.

He joined The Sydney Morning Herald as a senior feature writer in 1983. Two years later came Beijing, where he worked in a bureau shared by the Australian paper and the Financial Times. It was a useful arrangement for a reporter: one posting, two readerships, and a country undergoing changes that deserved more than a distant glance.

His Beijing years ran from 1985 to 1989, encompassing economic reform and the suppression of the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. They also brought a personal connection that lasted. He met Wang Ping in Beijing; they married and have two sons.

Tokyo followed, from 1989 to 1994. For the Financial Times, Thomson covered Japan as its bubble economy rose and fell. Looking back over those postings, the repeated subject is the distance between confidence and reality: governments promising change, markets assigning prices, and events refusing to obey the prospectus. A correspondent has to notice when the story changes, however much its protagonists would prefer the previous version.

Learning to find the next reader

London brought a different sort of responsibility. Thomson became the FT’s foreign news editor in 1994, then editor of its weekend edition in 1996. The work shifted from following events himself to deciding what other reporters should pursue, and how readers should encounter it.

A weekend newspaper has a peculiar brief. It must satisfy people who want to understand the world and people who have finally found time to enjoy it. Thomson oversaw a redesign and the development of How to Spend It. The title, at least, spared its readers any uncertainty about the assignment.

He subsequently led the FT’s US edition. Its American sales tripled to nearly 150,000 during his tenure. In 2001, the trade publication TJFR named him US Business Journalist of the Year. Here was an editor learning a commercial lesson through editorial work: a publication can travel when it gives a new audience a reason to care.

When he missed out on the FT’s top editorship, Rupert Murdoch offered him The Times. Thomson became its editor in 2002. The relationship with Murdoch would help determine the rest of his career. An Australian who had worked across Asia and America was now responsible for an institution whose name seemed to assume everyone already knew which times mattered.

The audience of Times Online expanded from under a million monthly users to almost 13 million during his editorship. That was an achievement in finding readers. Turning an audience into dependable income would become a much more persistent question for the newspaper business.

An editor crosses the balance sheet

Thomson joined Dow Jones in December 2007, following Murdoch’s purchase of the company. In May 2008, he became editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. The assignment put him over an international newsroom of more than 2,000 journalists across over 80 bureaus.

The Journal broadened its coverage and added sections beyond its traditional business and financial territory. Its digital products and international reach developed as well. For Thomson, the move extended an existing pattern: take a familiar newspaper and seek readers who might not yet regard it as theirs.

In January 2013, he moved into the chief executive’s role ahead of the separation that created the present News Corp that June. Editing and running a company share certain habits: choosing priorities, allocating scarce resources, deciding which promising idea must wait. Their scoreboards differ. An editor can celebrate a costly investigation; a chief executive must keep finding ways to afford the next one.

By 2018, Thomson was publicly describing the strategy as more digital, more global and more focused. HarperCollins’ acquisition of Harlequin was one expression of that approach. Publishing could reach new markets and formats, while the group’s other media properties offered ways to connect businesses with audiences.

The business behind the byline

A newspaper masthead is the visible part of News Corp. Much of Thomson’s strategy concerns products whose readers arrive with a particular job to do. Dow Jones sells professional information as well as journalism: services for understanding energy markets, assessing risk and navigating compliance. Those customers need information they can use in consequential decisions.

The acquisitions of OPIS and Base Chemicals, renamed Chemical Market Analytics, expanded that business. In fiscal 2024, business-to-business operations generated more than half of Dow Jones’s profitability for the first time. The daily paper remained prominent; specialist information increasingly helped support the economics around it.

Digital real estate adds another kind of information market. News Corp’s interests include REA Group and Move, which operates Realtor.com. A house hunter’s search looks different from a subscriber’s morning reading, but both place a value on useful information delivered when it is needed. That connection helps explain a portfolio that can look surprising if viewed only through its newspapers.

The shape of the group has changed, too. The sale of Foxtel to DAZN was completed in April 2025. When News Corp extended Thomson’s contract that June, it highlighted Dow Jones, digital real estate and book publishing as its core growth businesses. His contract now runs through June 2030.

Digital revenue represented roughly 20 percent of group revenue in fiscal 2014 and 50 percent in fiscal 2024. Those dated figures describe a shift in the business mix, rather than a promise that every newspaper has found the same answer. The arithmetic matters because Thomson’s defence of reporting comes with a corporate obligation to earn a return.

A seat opposite Silicon Valley

The argument with technology companies has been a long one. By 2017, Thomson was discussing Google’s changes to news rankings and continuing negotiations with Google and Facebook over subscriptions and data. Distribution could bring readers; it could also leave publishers dependent on decisions made elsewhere.

In a 2014 conversation with Peter Robinson, he argued that newspapers create communities and that technology could help them do that work. His outlook leaves room for new tools. The negotiation is over who gets the benefit, and on what terms. A publisher may welcome an invention while taking a keen interest in the invoice.

On May 22, 2024, News Corp and OpenAI announced a multiyear partnership. The agreement gave OpenAI access to current and archived material from major News Corp publications, permission to display content in responses, and journalistic expertise intended to improve its offerings. The scope covered specified news publications, rather than every business in the group.

Thomson welcomed the agreement with the phrase “veracity, for virtue and for value”. His enthusiasm had a commercial foundation: permission and compensation could become part of the relationship between a publisher and an AI developer. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, was now a negotiating counterpart and a partner.

By August 2026, Thomson was describing content relationships with both OpenAI and Meta, alongside discussions with other companies. He called the approach “woo and sue”. It is a compact phrase for a complicated position: agree terms where possible, pursue unauthorised use where necessary. Whether that produces durable income across the industry will take longer to judge than any announcement.

“Woo and sue.”

Robert Thomson · August 2026

Still counting, still arguing

The fiscal 2026 results gave Thomson numbers to work with. News Corp reported seven percent full-year revenue growth and a 15 percent increase in Total Segment EBITDA, its segment earnings measure before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Operating cash flow reached $1.24 billion. These were company results, produced by many businesses and people, rather than a personal scorecard.

The same results showed why a neat triumphal ending would be premature. The Sun’s global monthly digital audience was 65 million in June 2026, down from 87 million a year earlier. The Times and Sunday Times, including the Times Literary Supplement, increased closing digital subscriptions to 681,000 from 640,000. Even inside one company, different publications were living different stories.

Thomson’s own work has never been confined to company statements. He wrote The Judges, co-wrote The Chinese Army and edited True Fiction, a collection of satire. That last credit fits his public manner. He enjoys a verbal flourish, and a joke can make a business argument considerably easier to remember than a slide full of qualifications.

Yet the ambition beneath the language is practical: preserve the means to employ journalists, publish authors and sell information people consider worth having. His position also invites scrutiny. The interests of a large publisher and the interests of journalism can overlap without becoming identical. Deals should be judged by what they sustain, alongside what they earn.

At the Melbourne dinner in 2014, he offered young journalists a brisk instruction: “do overwork, and don’t over indulge”. It sounds like advice from someone still mindful of the newsroom’s daily demands. After decades of editing and negotiating, the question remains wonderfully concrete. Tomorrow there will be another story. Who will pay to have it reported?