James Paul Harding (born 15 September 1969) is a British journalist, and a former Director of BBC News who was in the post from August 2013 until 1 January 2018. He is the co-founder of Tortoise Media.
In December 2007, he was appointed as editor of The Times newspaper, the youngest person to assume the post, following Robert Thomson's appointment as publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
He left The Times in December 2012, and was succeeded by John Witherow as acting editor.
Early life and career
Harding was raised in north-west London, the grandson of a German Jewish refugee. He was educated at two independent schools for boys: at The Hall School in Hampstead in North West London and St. Paul's School in Barnes, near Hammersmith in London, followed by Trinity College, Cambridge (where he attained a First Class degree in history) and City University. Harding also spent a year studying at Davidson College in the United States. Harding won a Daiwa Scholarship in 1991, where he undertook intensive Japanese language study and worked as a speechwriter to Koichi Kato, who was Chief Secretary to the Cabinet of Japan, and for the Japan unit of the European Commission. Before entering the media, he studied Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
He began his career as a journalist at the Financial Times in 1994 and two years later opened the paper's Shanghai bureau where he covered the opening up of the Chinese financial markets, remaining there until 1999.
Editor of The Times
After serving for three years as the Financial Times''' Washington bureau chief, he joined The Times in Summer 2006 as Business Editor. His promotion to editor emerged in December 2007. Harding, the grandson of a German Jewish refugee, was its first Jewish editor. The Times, with Harding as editor, won the Newspaper of the Year Award for 2008 in March 2009 at the British Press Awards. Harding was responsible for the cancellation, and then re-introduction of the Times2 supplement in October 2010 after seven months, following complaints from readers.
With a reportedly unsustainable editorial budget, voluntary and compulsory redundancies were announced in June 2010, along the introduction of charges for readers for the digital edition. At the end of the previous month, Harding had asserted that the Internet could "wipe out" the newspaper without a paywall being introduced.
Harding said in 2011 that he "[believes] in the state of Israel. I would have had a real problem if I had been coming to a paper with a history of being anti-Israel. And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is pro-Israel.” We wrote an editorial called 'In defence of Israel' during the Gaza offensive, but we also reported on the use of white phosphorus, which was the Israelis breaking their own rules." He also said at this time that the BBC does not have "a pro-Israel newsroom and it has taken management to get some balance in there". Accordingly, Harding found this "frustrating because, unlike The Times where you can just choose not to buy it, you have to pay for the BBC."
Leveson and after
During his oral submission at the Leveson Inquiry on 7 February 2012, Harding apologised for the withholding of information from the High Court, without his knowledge, that Patrick Foster, then a reporter on his newspaper, in 2009 had hacked into the blogger NightJack's email account in order to identify him. Richard Horton, then a Lancashire detective constable, the author, had used Nightjack as a pseudonym for his blog on policing matters. He asserted that Alastair Brett, then legal manager at The Times, had kept knowledge about the hacking from him when the newspaper had successfully appealed against an injunction application in the High Court preventing publication and preserving Horton's privacy. Apologising also to Horton and Mr Justice Eady, who had sat at the hearing, Harding said that he only learned of the newspaper's action after the court hearing in June 2009 had taken place.<ref>Andrew Pugh "The Times and NightJack - the whole 'terrible' story" , Press Gazette, 8 February 2012</ref>
Post-Leveson, Harding took on the role of negotiating with Oliver Letwin, who as Minister of State at the Cabinet Office was the Prime Minister David Cameron's representative, with the proposal of a new supervisory model for press regulation backed by a Royal charter.