Colleagues,

Today we told our team in Boston that we are closing the bureau in its present form. The economic background to the closure is painfully obvious to us all. An investigative function will remain in Boston, but the core reporting team will be disbanded, though all nine reporters affected will certainly be able to apply for openings elsewhere on the paper. Coverage of the Boston mutual fund industry will switch to the Money and Investing team and we are creating an enhanced New York-based education team.

Any such decision inevitably stirs apprehension and uncertainty, but there are no plans, nascent or otherwise, to close any other U.S. or international bureau. Meanwhile, the Newswires bureau and the MarketWatch team in Boston will remain at their present staffing levels.

That there has been truly great reporting under the generalship of Gary Putka out of Boston over many, many years is not in doubt. But we remain in the midst of a profound downturn in advertising revenue and thus must think the unthinkable.

Robert

"Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity," managing editor Robert Thomson said. Uh, really? Yes! Since the font used to attribute quotes on this Google News page is too small for Thomson's taste, search chief Mayer is encouraging "digital disloyalty" among readers who are the actual legal property of the Wall Street Journal.

"Why isn't the font size bigger?" Thomson demands. Seriously, Marissa. What do you know about designing websites in comparison to the leering, name-calling newspaper lackey of digital media genius Rupert Murdoch?

To all:



Please gather at the Hub on the 6th floor at 2:30 for welcome remarks by Rupert Murdoch.



Best,

The Hub is the Journal's new high-tech, multiplatform cyborg center for conquering news in the 21st Century. There are screens everywhere, used mainly for laughing at Fox Business Network.

Take Thomson's comments at the goodbye party for longtime Journal man Dan Hertzberg, the deputy managing editor pushed into retirement after 32 years. They may have been good for staff cohesion, but we wonder if lead Fox News viper Roger Ailes will take them so cheerfully.

The story as we've confirmed it with three different WSJ staffers, is that Thomson, in praising Hertzberg's newsgathering skills, ended up discussing the newspaper's new "Hub," an area on the sixth floor with loads of flat-screen displays blaring TV news around the clock — the beating heart of the new, multiplatform Journal. Thomson (pictured) was saying Hertzberg is like a human version of that room, or something, with his ability to gather and process news. Whatever.

The line that pricked up reporters' ears was when Thomson joked that the real reason the Hub was built was actually to "double the viewership of Fox Business Network," or words to that effect, making fun of the network's vanishingly small audience. Zing!

Thomson then instituted a "new old tradition" of "banging out" forcibly retired staffers by pounding on the wall as they walk out of the newsroom for the last time. Apparently this is a British thing and, according to one staffer (disclaimer: American), awkward, especially on deadline after many long speeches. Back to the Fox bashing, please; that's the sort of catty backbiting a great many English-speaking journalists can really enjoy!

(PIc: Esther Dyson)

News Corp.'s social network is near the end of an advertising partnership with Google reportedly worth $300 million per year. Any sequel to the arrangement is expected to be worth considerably less.

Speaking at News Corp.'s D tech conference, which runs concurrent with Google's own I/O conference in San Francisco, MySpace executives insist they're not sweating. There's a year and a half left in the existing deal, CEO Owen Van Natta said, and it constitutes less than half MySpace's revenue.

Translation: MySpace has bigger problems to grapple with, like a recent poll showing 6 in 10 users are using the site less than they used to. And besides, there's plenty of time for the young and old generations of media moguls to patch things up with one another.

It all started Wednesday, when the Journal's managing editor, full of the sort of swagger Rupert Murdoch encourages at News Corp., took a victory lap for gains in copies sold to individuals ("the truest measure of readership") and in what people pay to read the Journal. In the process, he insinuated that some Times subscribers have suffered "brain death."

The Times blasted back that the Journal's growth has been due to discounted bundles of print and online subscriptions ($10 for the paper with an $89 online sign-up) and due to online-only sales. So the Journal's braggadocio was "strange," said a Times spokeswoman.

Now the Journal has sent us an email response (below) effectively stating — quite correctly — that if it has convinced people to send in money to read Journal content, the breakdown between print and online is unimportant (in this day and age especially). Besides, the Times is trying to sell digital subscriptions too, it just hasn't been nearly as successful.

Newspaper wars are an old tradition; they are one of the few types of competition the present generation of publishers have experience with. So this sort of petty feuding must be comforting, on some level, to both the Times and the Journal.

But the real threat is still online, in various corners of the internet. Name calling doesn't work so well there. These salty old media companies had better focus their aggression on innovation. No more circ memos!

Dear Ryan [Tate],

Your piece on the WSJ editor's leaked memo was interesting (as were the comments that followed). The memo by WSJ's Robert Thomson,
however, contained some strange analysis.

He says the Wall Street Journal was one of the only newspapers to show growth. This statement misses a major point:

The increase (0.6%) was driven by a 31,000 increase in Electronic circulation and a 102,000-copy (+21%) increase in deeply-discounted subscriptions — in some cases selling print subscriptions as a $10. "add-on" to an $89. wsj.com subscription. In reality, the Wall Street Journal lost 6% of its full-price subscriptions.

While the WSJ was up overall in copies sold, it was down 1.1% in print.

In these latest circulation figures, as filed with Audit Bureau of Circulations, subject to audit, The New York Times performed significantly better than the industry, showing modest declines (-3.5% daily, -1.7% on Sunday) in total circulation, but demonstrating strength in our National circulation as well as newsstand copies, results that were boosted by the incredible excitement during and following the election cycle.

Two years ago The New York Times changed its circulation strategy to pursue more highly-profitable, high-retention circulation, with less emphasis on things such as outbound telemarketing or special promotions that were expensive and resulted in high churn rates. Instead we are focusing on building our core of loyal readers. For example we have more than 830,000 subscribers who have been with us for two years or more, up from 650,000 in 2000. Our focus is on attracting a high-quality audience of individually-paid subscribers.

The NYT remains the largest 7-day newspaper in the U.S. and has won 101 Pulitzer Prizes and citations— including the five Pulitzers it was awarded last week — more than any other news organization.

Diane

Diane McNulty
Executive Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations
THE NEW YORK TIMES

New York Times editor Bill Keller has been practicing his jabs and left hook for some time. He called Murdoch's Journal "New York Times lite" at a staff meeting in February. This month he was quoted in the Nation musing on the rival paper's "identity crisis:"

If the paper has made up its mind what it wants to be, it's not clear to me... I really miss the long, well-told narratives and ambitious investigative projects. [The Journal's editor] decries that kind of journalism as a self-indulgence...

The Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson is feuding a bit harder, edging toward the bare-knuckled combativeness of his corporate siblings at the New York Post and Fox News.

Here's a memo he sent to staff earlier today. Along with the chart above, it's supposed to prove the Journal caters to the sort of active, engaged readers who pick up the paper on the newstand. USA Today and the Times, meanwhile, are for the non-sentient.

If this all reads like something out of a reality television show, well, maybe that's for the best: young people seem to pay far more attention to those types of programs than to newspapers. To change that, the industry might just have to borrow some tactics.

The editor, Robert Thomson, has been brutal; amplifying the views of his boss Rupert Murdoch, the Journal chief Tuesday called aggregators of newspaper content like blogs and Google "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet" whose "cynicism... about so-called traditional media is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional media."

The aggregators were making money off content "created by others" and "shamelessly" undermining the brands that originally created that content. Stealing, in short.

Within two days, the so-called parasites were themselves upset: Why was the Journal's AllThingsD technology website excerpting several paragraphs from their blog posts and posting it a Journal website without permission?

Not being the types to attend or obsess over newspaper conferences, they seemed unaware of Thomson's earlier comments. But judging by Andy Baio's roundup of reactions, they were as taken aback as Thomson, if a bit more genteel in responding:

• "What the hell is this," Delicious founder Joshua Schachter wrote after his story was copied onto Journal servers.
  
• "I sure wish they asked me first," wrote Metafilter creator Matt Haughley. "That's a hell of a lot of ads on my 'excerpt.'"
  
• "Deliberately confusing and deceptive," productivity publisher Merlin Mann told Baio.

(Baio has other responses, including two positive ones, at the link above.)

Kara Swisher, a former Journal reporter and coproducer of AllThingsD, responded quickly and sensibly. She trimmed some of the longer excerpts Baio showed her and explained she'd take down any content if asked. She indicated she'd add a disclaimer to make clearer the origin of the content.

Some might say AllThingsD.com still violates copyright law (it still takes several sentences, even several paragraphs); others would point out its practices are identical to what sites like the Huffington Post have been doing for some time; still others would say it's helping other sites by sending traffic.

But it's hard to argue with the observation that Swisher responded reasonably. And her critics, despite their initial shock, seem happy to reason back in all fairness and good faith. If only the Journal would do them the same courtesy when the shoe starts out on the other foot.

[Waxy.org via Daring Fireball]

The claim that websites which link to news stories are somehow harming them has been advanced by everyone from Journal editor Robert Thomson to AP chairman Dean Singleton. As geeks like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (left) have pointed out, they are blithering dunderheads who miss the point that links generate traffic to their own websites. Meanwhile, the doddering newspaper barons' cleverer lieutenants are trying to get into the business themselves.

The proof is in a new study by Hitwise, an online traffic-pattern tracker. Analyst Heather Dougherty has found that search engines, portals, social networks, and blogs generate about 40 percent of the link traffic to news websites, a proportion that has remained more or less unchanged for the past two years. Here's the chart:

Besides search engines, what generates the most traffic for news websites? Other news websites, it turns out. CNN.com, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, and NBC's Weather Channel rank in the top 10 traffic sources to the news and media category, according to Dougherty's study.

Techmeme's Rivera argues that news organizations complaining about aggregators aren't just wrongheaded — they're hypocrites, too, he told CNET News:

[The] WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators. Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership.

The implication: The newspaper industry's real problem isn't that sites like Google News and Techmeme exist. It's that they don't own them.

(Photo via Gabe Rivera)

The Ann Arbor (Michigan) News is going the Seattle P-I route, folding its print paper and going online-only, with a skeleton staff. Expect to see a lot of failing papers try this in the coming year—it's a relatively cheap gamble, and it it actually works, you retain the paper's valuable brand at a fraction of the price. But who knows if it will actually work! Also worth noting that this paper is owned by Advance, which just announced mandatory furloughs and cutbacks at its other papers. Advance also owns Conde Nast, and this may or may not be an indicator of larger financial issues there.

Two new magazines are starting up, now! They're parenting magazines in Long Island. Line up, J-school grads.

News from my home state: In Ocala, FL (childhood home of John Edwards' mistress!) the editor of "an award-winning local lifestyle magazine" plagiarized national news outlets at least 20 times, including one story that was lifted verbatim and published as a column on said editor's upcoming wedding. The lady's excuse: "Producing 17 issues a year is a huge responsibility." Mmm hmm. In her defense, that excuse is not as far-fetched as the notion that Ocala, FL has "an award-winning local lifestyle magazine."

The weekly paper in Carbondale, Colorado folded, so the citizens there just pulled together and put out a paper themselves, volunteer-style! Would this work in LA?

WSJ editor Robert Thomson is the bearer of good news! All his staff's mandatory hard work is paying off. This memo went out today:

Dear All,

Amidst the bleak, almost apocalyptic prognostications for the
newspaper industry, it is worth focusing for a moment on the increase
in the Journal's audience over the past year. We are the only large
paper in the country seeing a significant increase in core circulation
(papers for which people actually pay). The website, depending on the
month, has virtually doubled in size since the News Corp acquisition,
the WSJ mobile reader (stats attached) is a phenomenon, and the new
sports page has cult status.

The first slide in this immodest set is from our latest
reader-tracking study which long predates the News Corp purchase. It
is fair to say that the researchers have never seen such positive
returns during a survey period. Former subscribers are now twice as
likely to resubscribe. There is no doubt that revenue remains
"challenged", but there is a large and growing audience for our
content,

Robert.

Yesterday it was reported that WCBS anchor Steve Bartelstein had abruptly quit his job for unclear reasons. Now we know why, straight from Steve Bartelstein: "I'm leaving because I've been promoted several times, and yet, no raises, despite anchoring more hours then our noon and 6pm anchors. I'm leaving mainly because I'm waiting for a paycheck that this week is now a WEEK late." He's not sure if he's taking a break or out of the TV biz forever, but either way, he should still get his last check, yes?


A Singapore court has fined a WSJ editor $6,500 for "unwarranted attacks" on the Singapore Judiciary in editorials in the paper. Man, does the Singapore Judiciary suck a big donkey dick or what? USA.


Fantastico, US atty. general Eric "Marijuana is my middle name" Holder says that he is in fact open to the idea of jiggering with antitrust laws to help the dying newspaper industry, an idea championed by Nancy Pelosi as well as every newspaper owner in America. "I think that we need to have a healthy, vibrant newspaper industry, and I don't mean just online," Holder said, right after he said he loves to read the news "on my computer and iPhone and all that." Eric Holder is the problem and the solution.


One report puts the price that a private equity firm paid for the San Diego Union-Tribune as just "a little more" than $15 million. That's damn near nothing! Probably the reason that the CEO of the Washington Post is selling off millions of dollars worth of his stock in the company. But maybe all the rich people at Microsoft would like to buy the New York Times? "No,'' said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer, outside the McGraw-Hill Building in Manhattan this morning. "Not ‘no comment.' No." Hey man, you could have said that in a nicer way.

Dear All,

There is no doubt that co-operation between Newswires and Journal
journalists has improved markedly over the past year, but true
fraternity remains more nascent than mature. Our structure must
complement the needs of all Dow Jones readers and reflect the
contemporary value of what is crudely called "content". A breaking
corporate, economic or political news story is of crucial value to our
Newswires subscribers, who are being relentlessly wooed by less worthy
competitors. Even a headstart of a few seconds is priceless for a
commodities trader or a bond dealer – that same story can be
repurposed for a range of different audiences, but its value
diminishes with the passing of time.

Given that revenue reality, henceforth all Journal reporters will
be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news for the
Newswires. This is a fundamental shift in orientation which will also
require a fundamental change in the inaptly named Speedy system.

The Speedy was designed with a simple objective: the urgent
dissemination of breaking news unearthed by WSJ reporters. Apart from
being an important facet of the Newswires service, the system was
intended to enhance the newspaper's reputation as the world's leading
source of financial, business and general news. In the age of
digitally compressed content, the Speedy should have been a defining
advantage for Dow Jones – but, alas, too many of these items were
written in a way which neither made sense to Newswires users nor
maximized the value of the news they sought to convey.

The system is in need of revolution, not reform. We must all think
of ourselves as Dow Jones journalists and, at the least, have some
comprehension of the life-cycle of a news story and its relative worth
to our readers around the world. Not all content demands to be free
and our content, in particular, has a value that is sometimes better
recognised by our readers than our journalists. That we have multiple
opportunities to generate income from this content is in stark
contrast to many other revenue-challenged news organizations, which
have not sold their soul – they have merely given it away.

With these objectives in mind, we are sending Speedy to the
knackery and saddling up a successor, the URGENT. New nomenclature
alone will not generate news, so there must also be basic changes of
principle and practice at the Journal. A guide to the new system will
be published next week and we are aiming to launch on April 15. In
coming days, please raise any relevant issues with your bureau chief
or editor. There is much angst-ridden, vacuous debate about the fate
of American journalism – this is an important practical measure to
secure the long-term future of journalists at Dow Jones.

Robert.

Google's ads pick up on keywords in NonSociety, a collection of egoblogs maintained by Allison and two friends, vapid handbag designer Mary Rambin and insecure Silicon Valley heiress Meghan Asha Parikh. The search engine's ad-placing algorithms are mercilessly insightful. The current selection:

Davos, debt, and digestion. Pretty much sums up the threesome, doesn't it?

The other day, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson opined about Google on the Charlie Rose Show:

But one of the — Google — I mean, the harsh way of just defining it, Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it's terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.

As much as we hate to disagree with Thomson, we think Google has made an excellent qualitative judgment on NonSociety.

In classic News Corp fashion, after the initial email went out at 11:45 saying that a suspicious package had been received, they proceeded to evacuate 9 and 11 — the op-ed and executive floors — while making NO announcement of any kind to the rank-and-file reporters and editors on 10. Need them to get the paper out, after all. Word started to circulate, but a fair number of people learned that the floors directly above and below them had been evacuated only by reading gawker or nytimes.com. Finally another e-mail went out more than an hour later with the news that 9 and 11 had been evacuated, but instructing others to STAND BY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM THEIR MANAGERS REGARDING WORK. At that point, the 10th floor employees just started leaving — they've now all headed home, still with no instructions or information whatsoever from management.

Another employee tells us that they were hustled from the 10th floor, which wasn't being evacuated, to the 9th floor, which had been cleared, for a meeting to discuss evacuation plans.

Here's the email employees got more than an hour after the first one:

From: Hoffman, Howard
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:53 PM
To: Hoffman, Howard
Subject: WFC 9th and 11th floors evacuating - stand by for more instructions

Authorities are investigating suspicious packages delivered to our World Financial Center offices. As a precaution, the 9th and 11th floors have been evacuated while police and other safety personnel assess any potential hazard. Elevators are closed on those floors, requiring transit by emergency stairs.

All employees in World Financial Center should follow the instructions of emergency personnel while standing by for further instructions from their managers regarding work.

We will advise you as soon as possible of any updated information or instructions.

HH

Here's whats's now known: An assistant to editor Robert Thomson opened one of the 13 or more envelopes that have led to evacuations at the paper's lower-Manhattan headquarters. The envelopes all bore a Tennessee postmark — and echoed a series of post-9/11 mail scares where envelopes, some containing actual anthrax spores and some containing harmless powder showed up in mailrooms from the Capitol to the Florida offices of the National Enquirer.

For those who are worried: Paul Gigot of the WSJ editorial page is safe, according to a colleague trapped on the 10th floor who took the initiative to call a colleague stuck in the lobbby. Gigot and others were waiting outside the turnstiles as security goons refuse to let him return to his desk. How will they meet the paper's pushed-back 3 p.m. deadline? A tipster tells us the WSJ has rented space in a nearby hotel for employees to finish work:

Only unessential employees on the 9th and 11th floors were told to leave, or those who were set up to work at home. We're now working on the 10th and 12th floors (the ones that weren't evacuated). Some people are working from home. Deadlines have been moved back to 3 p.m. for filing copy.

Relevant e-mail:

Subject: Evacuated staff can wait at Marriott for further instructions

Employees already evacuated from the 9th and 11th floors of WFC who are NOT needed to publish the Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's, Newswires or for other critical functions can go home for the remainder of the day.

Staff required for news products or for other critical functions should await further instructions. Space has been secured for you at the Marriott World Financial Center immediately across West Street while wait. Go to the Financial Ballroom on the second floor where seats are available and coffee and sandwiches will be served.

We will advise you as soon as possible with new information and next steps.

HH

This insane theory, though, goes like this: the true target of the smear isn't Wendi at all, but rather Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, and one of the rising golden boys of the News Corp. empire and therefore a threat to Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Thomson, whose life story is uncannily similar to Rupert's, also has a Chinese wife, Wang Ping, who happens to be friends with Wendi. Thus, the damaging suggestion about Thomson would be that Ping had aided and abetted Wendi in her dalliance. The only person who'd try to pull off such a crazy scheme? Naturally, News Corp.'s resident master of dark arts and head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Which brings us full circle back to Wolff's book, which has supposedly caused a rift between Ailes and Murdoch because it, as the New York Times reported in October, "suggests that Mr. Murdoch is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares 'the general liberal apoplexy,' as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant."

So there you have it. A crazy theory so crazy it could be true (but probably isn't!). I'm going to head off to Wolff's party now and see if I can dig up something actually substantial. If you know anything about who's behind the Wendi rumor, please email me.

Which only makes sense, since Wall Street doesn't seem to have much of a future. Since News Corp. bought the newspaper last year, it has been expanding coverage of general-interest subjects like politics and sports. Sure, Journal publicists are milking the market-meltdown story for everything it's worth. But in the long run, it can't be healthy for a business newspaper to see its core readership disappear.

So Thomson is set on stealing other newspapers' readers. At a recent media conference, he mentioned L.A. and Chicago as markets he'd like to take on, as those cities' dominant dailies shrink away to irrelevance. (The Huffington Post, too, has made plans to expand in Chicago. Who knew Chicago was so interesting?)

His plan for increased local coverage would seem more impressive if the Journal hadn't tried expanding regionally in the '90s and failed. But hey, he's only been on the job a year! Institutional memory is for oldtimers.

(Photo via PaidContent)

What does matter, according to “The Man Who Owns the News,” is his third wife, Wendi Deng, who is 38 years his junior and controls him to the point of reading his e-mail.

(“Let’s recast this story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement,” Mr. Wolff writes, about how she came to marry such a powerful older man. “She’s not Becky Sharp, she’s Pip in ‘Great Expectations.’ ”)

That little detail about Deng resonates especially strongly since it reinforces the picture the Journal painted of her in 2000 (original) as a deft and serial manipulator of powerful men:

Her ticket out of China came in 1987, when she met a Los Angeles couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry... Mrs. Cherry says she had grown increasingly suspicious about Ms. Deng's relationship with her husband. Mrs. Cherry recalls discovering a cache of photographs her husband had taken of Ms. Deng in coquettish poses back in his hotel room in Guangzhou. Mr. Cherry confirms he had become infatuated with the young woman...

The Cherrys divorced, and Jake Cherry married Ms.Deng in February 1990. But that union didn't last. Mr. Cherry says that about four months after the wedding, he told Ms. Deng to leave because she had started spending time with a man named David Wolf...

Former colleagues describe Ms. Deng as having been adept at juggling the interests of News Corp.'s various units, which like to operate independently... She is said to have shown no hesitation about walking unannounced into a senior executive's office to discuss the latest Chinese entrepreneur she had met or government official she had contacted...

In early 1998, she first appeared at [Murdoch's] side, acting as his interpreter when he traveled to Shanghai and Beijing. By the summer of 1998, the Star TV staff was buzzing about romance between the pair. After dinner meetings in Hong Kong, they were observed holding hands. In May, Mr. Murdoch had separated from his wife of 31 years, Anna. The split surprised even his closest aides, who say they hadn't seen any sign of a rupture.

Can't wait to see how the book is reviewed in the Post and Journal!

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that Gerard Baker is appointed Deputy
Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. Gerry has
had a distinguished career as a journalist at the BBC, Financial Times
and The Times of London. He has reported on subjects as diverse as the
exotica of Japanese politics, the minutiae of monetary policy, and the
frailties of the international financial system.

In his most recent role in Washington as US Editor and Assistant
Editor of The Times, Gerry has been a commentator and reporter, and so
has a clear and principled understanding of the objective of
objectivity. He will bring considerable energy and wit to the Journal,
and assist me in overseeing the transition of the paper, the website
and Newswires.

Our editing troika remain at the heart of the day-to-day decisions, as
do Mike Miller and Alix Freedman. Neal Lipschutz at Newswires will
continue to report directly to me and Alan Murray remains at the helm
of online. Gerry will edit the Journal in my absence and be tasked
with accelerating our development as a national paper of influence and
as an unrivalled international business news franchise.

Gerry, who will take up his new position in January, received a First
Class Honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Corpus
Christi College at Oxford University. His first job after graduation
was at the Bank of England.

From 1988 to 1994, he worked at the BBC, initially as a producer in
London and New York, and then as Economics Correspondent. In 1994, he
joined the Financial Times, where he was Tokyo Correspondent, US
Economics Correspondent, and Washington Bureau Chief and Associate
Editor. Four years ago, he joined The Times, where he also oversaw the
development of the paper's US Edition and its successful American
website.

Robert.