Thomson Financial history

West Publishing was founded by John B. West and his brother Horatio in 1872 in St Paul, Minnesota.

Paul Julius Reuter retires at 61 due to “failing health.” He died in 1899 at his home in Nice, France.

After a brief, unsuccessful attempt at farming in Saskatchewan, he returned to Ontario in 1920 to establish an automotive parts distributorship, which also proved unsuccessful.

Finally, in 1930, Thomson agreed to a franchise arrangement to sell radios in the remote town of North Bay.

In addition to the Depression and poor radio reception, the single transmitter in North Bay was decrepit.' Thomson solved the predictable problem of feeble radio sales by opening his own radio station, CFCH, in 1932 on borrowed money.

1934: Thomson acquires his first newspaper, the Timmins Press.

Newspapers became Thomson's main concern, while Jack Kent Cooke, with whom he went into partnership in 1940, assumed management of the radio end of the business.

Reuters restructures itself so that it is owned by the British National and Provincial Press, together with (in 1947) the Press Associations of Australia and New Zealand.

Their partnership ended in 1949, just as Thomson began buying newspapers outside Ontario.

In 1952 he bought his first non-Canadian newspaper, the Independent of St Petersburg, Florida, to add to the 12 he already owned.

Reuters had also been first with the news of it being built in 1961.

Thomson had been looking for a national daily newspaper to put together with the Sunday Times, and in 1966 he bought the London Times and its associated weeklies, Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement, from the Astor family.

In 1967 the company acquired 16 daily and six weekly newspapers, mainly from the purchase of the Brush Moore Newspaper, Inc., and was publishing more daily newspapers in the United States than in Canada.

In 1971 Thomson went into its single most profitable area of business when it joined with Occidental Petroleum, Getty Oil, and Allied Chemical as the sole U.K. partner in a bid for licenses to explore for oil in the North Sea.

When Kenneth Thomson succeeded his father in 1976, he inherited control of a $750 million media monolith.

In 1980 International Thomson would relinquish the Yellow Pages contract and start its own local directory operation in partnership with the American firm Dun & Bradstreet.

1981: Times Newspapers division is sold to Rupert Murdoch.

At that time it had provided about 75 percent of ITOL's profits, but by 1985, when the Scapa field in which it had invested came onstream, this proportion had fallen to just over 50 percent.

ITOL's philosophy, according to a 1988 Forbes article, became: 'Buy the market leader, even in a specialized field, and then you can afford to pay for the acquisition.'

Michael Brown was named deputy chairman in 1998, replacing longtime adviser to Kenneth Thomson, John Tory; Brown was in turn replaced as president and CEO by Richard Harrington.

The sale of Bell Globemedia, including the Corporation’s interest in The Globe and Mail, is the culmination of the Thomson strategy to exit the newspaper business undertaken in February 2000.

Thomson sells DBM (Drake Beam Morin), which was acquired along with other Harcourt assets in 2001, to Compass Partners International Limited.