Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Until his 40th birthday, Roy Herbert Thomson never owned a newspaper or hoped to. But once started, Thomson made up for lost time as few publishers have. After he bought a tiny paper in Northern Canada (with $3,000 he borrowed), the newspaper business looked so easy to Thomson that he confidently told a friend: "I'll be a millionaire some day." It was an accurate prediction. At 59, Publisher Thomson owns a string of 18 dailies all over Canada, close to one-fourth of Canada's English-language newspapers. Last year he pushed into...
Last week Canadian-born Thomson crossed the ocean again for the biggest newspaper deal of his brief but spectacular career. For about $3,000,000, he bought control of Scotland's small but influential 136-year-old morning Scotsman (circ. 55,000) and its sister papers, the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch (71,000) and the Weekly Scotsman (66,000). In taking control of the papers from old Scottish family ownership, Thomson gets a staff of 800, a 13-story Renaissance-style building that cost $2,400,000 in 1904, and the prestige of a pioneer publishing company. On the Scotsman...
...Chain Store. No newsman himself, Thomson concentrates his energies on the business side, lets individual editors run their own show up to a point. The point: the paper's profit & loss statement. But Thomson's mechanical improvements have made it easier for editors to show profits. In Canada, he has connected most of his papers with a teletype circuit. Thus, when one has a successful feature or circulation-building idea, other papers in the chain can promptly pick it up. At first his chain-store methods set conservative Canadian publishers against him. But they changed their minds when...
...Thomson, the son of a Toronto barber, learned how to read a balance sheet the hard way. He quit school in Toronto at 14, began to clerk in a fishing supply store, starting at $5 a week. Within ten years he had invested his small savings so shrewdly that he had $20,000, which he lost in a pie-in-the-sky Saskatchewan land deal. During the Depression he sold radios in northern Ontario, quickly found that in some remote Canadian towns reception was so poor that few people would buy his sets. Thomson knew how to solve that...
...Composer Thomson has been doing musical portraits since 1928, usually with the subjects posing as for a painter, and now has well over a hundred (including one about Pablo Picasso called Bugles and Birds and a brassy waltz about Fiorello La Guardia...