Gray Lady Reaches Across the Pond & Medium for New CEO

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)After an eight-month search, The New York Times has tapped 55-year-old Mark Thompson, BBC Worldwide's Director General since 2004, to be its new CEO, the paper announced today.

In a letter to staffers, Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. acknowledged in the newspaper's selection of broadcasting executive Thompson, who has presided over the BBC's global and digital expansion: "Our future is on to video, to social to mobile. It doesn't mirror what we've done. It broadens what we are going to do."

Thompson will join the Times in November and take a seat on the paper's board of directors. The Gray Lady has not had a CEO since December 2011, when Janet Robinson was ungently pushed out the door after butting heads with company executives. The Times last month reported an $88 million net loss for the Second Quarter of 2012 compared to a year ago, but, on the bright side, noted a jump in digital subscriptions to more than 509,000.

Thompson, a graduate of Merton College at University of Oxford, joined the BBC in 1979 as a production trainee and had become its director of television by 2000.