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Roy Thomson of Fleet Street

出版	Collins, 1965
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=tmoLAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"At a famous dinner party, Lord Beaverbrook paid his host, Lord Thomson, the greatest compliment he is likely to receive. He urged him to give up his 100m news empire and take to anything else, so long as he ceased , in Fleet Street, to "trouble our little group of newspaper proprietors'. Yet only fifteen years earlier, when Beaverbrook had been asked about his compatriot, this same Thomson, he had replied, "He's a little guy. Owns a lot of little newspapers'. In this biography, Russell Braddon is totally frank and the story is extraordinary. Roy Thomson was born in Toronto in 1894 with few disadvantages. His family was poor and his eyesight was bad. His early ventures were inauspicious. He failed as a most unlikely farmer in the prairies of Saskatchewen, his first business in Torontowent bankrupt, and he plunged into radip, in the idst of the depression, in spite of the fact that he was penniless and knew nothing abut broadcasting. The chance of his becoming a millionaire by the time he was 30, an ambition which he had characteristically proclaimed to all and sundry on every possible occasion, was then already gone, but his ramshackle radio station somehow survived-on loans, overdrafts, postponed salary cheques and above all on its owner's self-confidence- and Thomas even started to expand. He opened more radio stations, raised more loans, hired more employees and, most important of all acquired his first newspaper in the raw mining town of Timmins, Northern Ontario. These were the romantic years of this man's life, when he was bringing up his family and developing this do-it -yourself techniques of whole-hearted free enterprise which he has followed ever since. It was at this time also, in the early middle age, that he was joined by Young Jack Kent Cooke, and together they forged ahead so dramatically that, by the beginning of the war, though he was still not rich, he looked to his Canadian Competition competitors a powerful and threatening force. As the business advanced, so its owner's appetite and ambitions grew. He wanted to own fifty newspapers and soon was looking beyond Canada to the United Kingdom for new acquisitions. And so, his biography enters that period when he acquired first Edinburgh's Scotsman, then Scottish Television and then Lord Kemsley's Sunday Times and all his regional newspapers. It covers Thomson's defeats and his triumphs whilst, his target having been raised to a hundred then two hundred newspapers, he acquired a publishing house in Edinburgh, radio interests in the West Indies, and newspapers and magazines wherever they were available from Mississippi to Lagos. Thomson thus became engaged in business where the stakes were millions and his influence grew steadily. The "little guy" who once had owned only "a lot of little newspapers' has entered the big league, not just as a financial wizard, but as a publishing baron whose impact on the press in both Canada and Britain was almost revolutionary."-Publisher