Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson was born in London in 1957 to an English father and an Irish mother. He was educated at Stonyhurst College and Merton College Oxford University where he read English Language and Literature. He joined the BBC in 1979 as a graduate trainee and became a journalist and TV producer. It was the start of a three decade long broadcasting career in which he became the editor of key news programmes, ran a TV network, and became first CEO of the UK TV company Channel 4 and then Director-General (CEO and Editor-in-Chief) of the BBC as a whole. In 2012, he was appointed CEO of The New York Times Company and moved with his wife, the author Jane Blumberg, to New York City. In that same year he was a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at Oxford University.