Asia connection to Dow Jones reshuffle

I have just arrived in Paris to see that the expected game of musical chairs at Dow Jones in advance of the Murdoch takeover has started with a vengeance. There are strong Asian connections to two of the key players:

• L. Gordon Crovitz will step down from his publisher of The Wall Street Journal, exec VP of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group. He is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in the early days of its DJ ownership and while it was a still a weekly news magazine. Crovitz will apparently still write a column for the WSJ.
  
• Crovitz will be succeeded by the current editor of Murdoch's London Times, Robert Thomson. Although he has held a series of high profile positions in London since the early 1990s, first at the FT and then more recently at the helm of the Times, Thomson worked as an FT correspondent in Beijing between 1985 and 1989 and then in Tokyo from 1989 - 1994. We met a few times in Beijing, both in our mid-20s and he was a clearly a man with a strong career before him.