How excited is Robert Thomson to come to America to be the publisher of the Wall Street Journal? Possibly he has some mixed feelings! In a January, 2001 Business Week profile, Rupert Murdoch's boy actually savaged his new home. Thomson was at the FT then, and said that the Journal is best on cute little stories like ''midsize companies doing middling deals in the Midwest." Comparing the FT to the WSJ? "It's a Lexus-Taurus thing." We figure either he really does think the WSJ is a pile of crap—or he just likes to trash-talk because he's Australian, and therefore doesn't mean anything he says.

The Financial Times Takes On the World [BW]