The Accumulator

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 the U.S. by buying the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Independent (circ. 25,754), and this year he reached across the Atlantic to start the Canada Review, a weekly for Canadians in Britain and Britons with business interests in Canada.

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's hundredth birthday the London Times conceded that the paper "is, so to speak, the Times of Scotland."

The 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 every daily that Thomson bought improved its news coverage, became a better newspaper as well as a better investment for him. Three years ago he was elected president of the Canadian Daily Newspapers Association.

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. For $500, he bought his own transmitter, started broadcasting recorded programs from North Bay, Ont. (pop. 15,599). When he moved 230 miles north to Timmins (pop. 28,790) to start another station in 1934, he ended up with a weekly newspaper too, within three years had converted it into a daily and was shopping for more newspapers.

Cure-All. From then on, Thomson expanded rapidly. Frequently, he didn't even see the paper he was buying, based his decision on its balance sheet. He likes to say: "There's nothing in this business that a few thousand dollars of ad sales can't cure." He bought the St. Petersburg Independent because "I want something to keep me busy while I'm down there vacationing."

In Scotland, where his parents were born, Thomson has bigger ideas. Although he has no plans to change the staff or the policies (Tory) of his three new papers, the "fact that we intend to follow the same editorial policy doesn't preclude certain changes. First we have to work with the paper and learn what it needs. But some changes would be obvious to American newspaper operators, front-page ads, for example, and column widths. Maybe there's good reason in Scotland for front-page ads; we'll have to see. But we won't be fighting just to hold our ground." To get a better view, Publisher Thomson, who this year was an unsuccessful Tory candidate for the Canadian Parliament, plans to move to Scotland, make his permanent home in Edinburgh. Says he: "Up to now, I've just been an accumulator of papers. I've never been an operator. Now I'm going to operate a paper, day to day. I'm going to be right in the middle of it."

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