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| ROY THOMSONFrom scratch he created the predecessor to today's Thomson CorporationBy John VivianA barber's son, Roy Thomson quit school at 13. When he grew up, he became a traveling salesman in northern Ontario, hawking auto parts and washing machines. One day in 1932 somebody mentioned that a radio station was for sale. Things weren't going that well on the road, so Thomson scraped together a down payment. Years later, Thomson said his favorite radio music was "the sound of radio commercials at $10 a whack." Two years later, for $200 down, he bought the run-down Timmons, Ontario, Weekly Press. There, Thomson applied a two-part principle that would make him one of the richest people in the world. First, keep expenses minimal. Second, boost income by charging advertisers and subscribers as much as the market will bear. Eventually the paper went daily. That began a buying binge. Before he died in 1976 at age 82, Roy Thomson owned more than 200 newspapers in Canada and the United States. The Toronto Globe & Mail was the prestige flagship, but most of Thomson newspapers were distinguished only as low-budget money machines. The adjective "cruddy" comes up often among media critics. Thomson, known for quips, once was asked to define news: "The stuff you separate the ads with." Thomson was intrigued with his Scottish heritage, and even as his North American empire was expanding he spread out to the British Isles. He bought mostly small dailies, but also, in 1959, two of the England's leading newspapers, the Sunday Times of London and then the Times of London. Not long thereafter, Queen Elizabeth put him in the peerage, as Lord Thomson of Fleet. At the time, Fleet Street was the home of London's major newspapers. When Lord Thomson died. he was worth almost $1 billion. His son Ken Thomson, of Toronto, still runs the company in the money machine style of his father. In 1981, he sold the London Sunday Times and Times. "Just a drag on profits," he said. Ken Thomson was ranked the seventh richest person in the world in 1998 by Forbes magazine, his net worth estimated at $14.4 billion.
sa2 bibliography: William Prochnau. "The State of the American Newspaper: In Lord Thomson's Realm," American Journalism Review (October 1998), Pages 44-61.
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