Mark Thompson at the New York Times: the enviable position of being Arthur Sulzberger's No 2.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, has the kind of equivocal reputation that attaches to most leaders of deeply bureaucratic and largely immoveable organizations. Especially in a cost-cutting era, you are likely to please nobody very much -- and your future career might be better served in another country.

On Monday, Thompson was named president and chief executive of New York Times Company , an organization that, at least in terms of the hand-wringing and angst it provokes as to the future of the culture, is not dissimilar to the BBC.

Personally, I lose the plot line when my friends in the British media go on about the internecine issues of the Beeb, so my view of Thompson, whom I've …