John Witherow (born 20 January 1952, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a journalist, who is the editor of the Sunday Times.
He migrated to Britain in the late 1950s and later attended Bedford School and the University of York.
In 1971 he went to Namibia as a volunteer teacher to teach at St Mary's Anglican School in Ovamboland, but on being refused a permit to enter Ovamboland by the South African government he was asked by Bishop Colin Winter to remain in Windhoek to help establish a Diocesan Library and study centre for correspondence students.
He was sent by Reuters to the Cardiff School of Journalism, where he gained a Distinction. He worked in Madrid and London for Reuters before joining The Times as a reporter. He covered the Falklands War in 1982 and the Iran-Iraq war, before moving to The Sunday Times. There he served in several positions, including Defence Editor, Diplomatic Editor, Foreign Editor and managing Editor of News. Witherow was made acting editor after the departure of Andrew Neil in 1994 and confirmed in the job the following year. Although he was damaged early in his editorship after publishing false claims that Michael Foot was a KGB agent,[1] Witherow is now one of the longest-serving editors in Murdoch’s News International empire, presiding over the expansion of one of his most successful newspapers and reconfirming its reputation for breaking powerful news stories (cash for questions; cash for honours) and developing its three magazines. Witherow is married to Sarah Linton, who is an employment lawyer and a partner with the American law firm Bryan Cave. He has three children: Sam, Ronald and Anna.
Contents |
John Witherow sailed on the HMS Invincible with the British troops involved in the Falklands War. While on HMS Invicible, working as a Times journalist at the time, he said, "...the atmosphere was quite extraordinary, there were hundreds of thousands of people lining the quay, waving and within the ship there was a curious mood of ebullience and aggression".
| Media offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Andrew Neil |
Editor of The Sunday Times 1994–Present |
Succeeded by (incumbent) |
|
||||||||
|
||||||||