Keynote Speaker: Robert Thomson
Our keynote speaker at the Deadline Club Annual Awards Dinner will be Robert Thomson, the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. In this role, he oversees the news section of The Wall Street Journal and the editorial operations of Dow Jones News Wires.
Previously, Mr. Thomson was publisher of Dow Jones & Company, responsible for flagship publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch.com.
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).
Mr. Thomson was born in Torrumbarry, near Echuca, in southern Australia , and is married with two sons.
Our keynote speaker will be introduced by Keith J. Kelly, a former
Vice President of The Deadline Club and current member of the club’s
Professional Council. Kelly has been writing the Media Ink column for
the NY Post since July 1998. He consistently breaks stories on the
inner workings of the major companies in the magazine, book, and
newspaper publishing businesses. Kelly was once termed “New York’s
most influential media columnist” by New York magazine.
He jumped to the Post from the Daily News, where he had been hired by
Pete Hamill in March 1997 as that paper’s first media columnist in
Hamill’s short reign as editor-in-chief.
Prior to that Kelly was a senior editor at Advertising Age, Crain
Communications from 1993 to 1997. He was the launch editor of Folio:
First Day and an editor-at-large of Folio magazine. Earlier, he was
the editorial director of Magazine Week and a senior vice president in
its parent company, Lighthouse Communications.
He freelanced from Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1980 where he is
credited as breaking the story of the IRA’s pending hunger strike, and
served as a New York correspondent for the now defunct Dublin daily,
The Irish Press. He worked at McGraw-Hill Publications on a variety of
trade publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Kelly started his career as a general assignment reporter on the
Smithtown News on Long Island in 1977.
The Brooklyn-born Kelly also worked as a bartender, a paint salesman
for Sears, a laborer for a masonry contractor and a security guard.
