Uber received the single largest investment ever made in a private company on Wednesday — a $3.5 billion check from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which values Uber itself at $62.5 billion. The company’s CEO called it a “vote of confidence in our business.”

In other words, a ride-hailing company that bills itself as the future of transportation is cozying up to a country where women who have the audacity to drive can be sentenced to floggings. 

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Down in the crypt underneath the vast bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral, down there where London started, there is a handsome memorial stone with a haunting inscription.

“Lord Thomson of Fleet,” it says. “He gave new direction to the British newspaper industry.”

And then the sentence that gives pause: “A strange and adventurous man from nowhere, ennobled by the great virtues of courage, and integrity, and faithfulness.”

Roy Thomson died in 1976 at the age of 82, and his was indeed a remarkable business story. The plaque made me remember it again.

He was born to a pretty poor family in Toronto in 1894, and was hindered by poor eyesight. Or maybe helped, increasing his doggedness. He dabbled in small businesses from his teens onwards, with little success.

He tried farming, and failed. He went back to Toronto and had several undistinguished jobs. Then he started selling radios in small towns deep in northern Ontario, the only territory left.

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And there began a remarkable media story. Rural radio users in the 1930s had little to listen to. So Roy Thomson bought someone else’s neglected radio licence, and his station CFCH began broadcasting in the town of North Bay in March 1931; the inaugural programme had music by the Battery Boys and a speech by the mayor.

Roy Thomson, odd job man, was on his way. In 1934 he bought a small local paper, the Timmins Daily Press, beginning what soon became a diverse media empire. By the end of the 1940s, Thomson owned 19 newspapers and was president of the Canadian daily paper publishers’ association.

But the old country beckoned. In 1952, seeking his Scottish roots, Roy Thomson moved to Edinburgh. The next year he bought the Scotsman, giving him some status but a lot of criticism as he applied commercial instincts to a venerable paper.

Then came television. The government introduced what was called, in typical British look-down-the-nose way, “commercial” television. Roy Thomson with his Scotsman credentials led the consortium which won the franchise for Scottish TV, launched in 1957.

Brash, vulgar

In a much-quoted (but maybe inaccurately quoted) phrase, he described television as a licence to print money. It was.

But print was at the heart of his increasing empire. As he put it: “I buy newspapers to make money, to buy more newspapers to make more money.”

Image copyright Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno

Like Beaverbrook before him and Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch after him, Roy Thomson was a wild colonial boy who cut a swathe through traditional owned British newspapers.

He used the profits from STV to buy a raft of Kemsley newspapers from the Kemsley family in 1957, including the Sunday Times.

When the family owners of what used to be termed The Times of London panicked over tiny losses in 1966, Thomson was there to snap it up. His newspaper empire grew to embrace more than 200 papers in Britain, Canada and the USA, and a host of other publishing interests.

Every time he met another newspaperman, he would ask if their paper was for sale. It was brash, vulgar, persistent.

Not just publishing, either. With its Scottish perspective connection, the International Thomson Organisation (as it was by then called) joined a consortium that successfully struck oil in North Sea fields.

Much of the group’s flair was due to a canny chief executive, Gordon Brunton, now Sir Gordon. He had been at the London School of Economics with Vladimir Raitz, the man who revolutionised post war British travel.

In 1950 Mr Raitz had organised what was effectively the first modern package holiday, flying fellow Russians to Corsica for a holiday in the sun for 32 all round, at a time when harsh official limits on taking sterling abroad severely restricted foreign travel from the UK.

Mr Raitz founded the pioneering Horizon Holidays and later helped Sir Gordon launch what became Thomson Holidays, one of the main travel companies of its time.

Remarkable story

I saw Roy Thomson once, coming in through the revolving doors at the Sunday Times in London, where he moved around by public transport.

His pebble thick spectacle lenses glinted in the sun, and he was on his way upstairs to his office, probably to get out his ruler and measure the amount of advertising in his own newspapers and that of his rivals.

This overt preoccupation with the commerce of newspapers was scorned by superior journalistic types, but it was he, not they, who got a barony named after Fleet Street, where his newspapers never had offices.

Image copyright Pascal Le Segretain

But for all Roy Thomson’s commercial instincts, he failed to transform the impossibly tangled way that newspapers were produced.

A year-long strike of production workers at the Times and the Sunday Times in 1979 changed little, and not long afterwards his son Kenneth (Lord Thomson in Britain, Ken in Canada) sold those two papers to Rupert Murdoch, who then took on the print unions in a decisive encounter that transformed Fleet Street.

Many other papers followed that sale. But though print has little or no part in it, Roy Thomson had created a continuing huge business empire.

At one time his late son Ken (also Lord Thomson, but only in Britain) was named by the magazine Forbes as the ninth richest man in the world.

Roy Thomson’s grandson David inherited the leadership of the company in 2006 and continued the evolution of the business by buying the venerable news agency Reuters two years later. He’s now chairman of the company named Thomson Reuters, the biggest business information provider in the world.

It is a remarkable family story, based on the man who was still a failing jack of all trades at the age of 36, still known only in Canada at the age of 54, who became a national known figure in Britain only in his 60s. Roy Thomson’s autobiography is called “After I was 60”.

That’s what the plaque means by calling him a strange and adventurous man from nowhere. It is striking to see him so memorialised in St Paul’s.

Six men were nabbed in Georgia for trying to sell uranium to an unknown buyer—just months after a criminal group was arrested for peddling a radioactive isotope on the black market. “>

After the success of self-published authors like Andy Weir and EL James, Hollywood is scooping up the rights to books as fast as it can. But why and is it always good for the author?

After watching Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill, self-published author Mark Dawson was inspired to create his own answer to the films heroine Beatrix Black Mamba Kiddo. And now Dawson and his character government-employed assassin Beatrix Rose are set to take on Hollywood, with his series on the verge of a major television deal, complete with a triple A producer.

Admitting he had a holy shit moment when he was told who the producer was, the Salisbury-based former lawyer said he had initially signed a shopping agreement after an approach through his website. They have attached a writer and an extremely well-known Hollywood figure and director to it, Dawson says. The people linked are all serious players household names and they have pitched it to half a dozen studios and from that they have got an agreement [to develop it] for television.

Dawson wasnt always Hollywood fodder. Sales of his first self-published novel, 2012s Black Mile, only trickled in until he took Amazons advice and offered it to readers for free. In one weekend, his novel was downloaded 50,000 times. Dawson built his audience from there, spending hundreds of pounds a day on Facebook advertising and writing on his commute. After writing 23 books in four years, he says his annual income is now in the high six figures.

Details of Dawsons TV deal are under wraps, and he says it is expected to be finalised in the next few days. But his is just the latest in a line of deals between studios and self-published authors, including AG Riddle and Hugh Howey, who have been targeted by studios after the successes of Andy Weirs The Martian and EL Jamess Fifty Shades franchise. AG Riddles Departure series was scooped up by Fox-based producer Steve Tzirlin in a six-figure deal, while Howeys dystopian sci-fi novel Wool was signed up by Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox.

Bestselling self-published authors attract producers because they have a proven track record if they stay on Amazon sales charts over time, Howey said. Hollywood is always looking for a built-in audience. They want to know theyll recoup their investment, he says. Modern films easily cost $100m to make, usually more. There isnt much room for risk here.

Another attraction in the litigious world of film, according to producer Doreen Spicer, is that these self-published books provide insurance. Theres a level of security that the story is original and not based on a pitch or idea from a writer in the room, said Spicer, whose credits include US sitcom The Wannabes and animated series The Proud Family. A producer can safeguard themselves from lawsuits by purchasing or licensing copyrights.

One of the most high-profile successes is Andy Weirs The Martian: a sci-fi thriller set on the red planet that the author self-published as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents. The 2015 film adaptation, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon as Weirs leading astronaut Mark Watney, made $630m worldwide.

You never know how a film will turn out, but the film version of The Martian is incredible and I know Andy is thrilled with how it came out, says David Fugate, who became Weirs agent before the film deal went through a precaution he warns self-published authors to consider: In book publishing, the agreement licenses the publisher a specific set of rights and typically anything thats not covered in the agreement is reserved for the author. In the film industry, its exactly the opposite … the only rights reserved to the author are spelled out in a single clause. So if its not mentioned in that clause, it no longer belongs to the author, but to the purchaser of the rights. And of course, when youre licensing that broad a range of rights, having a clear understanding of what you should be paid for all those rights is critical.

As long as self-published authors take on an agent they should be fine. Otherwise they are mincemeat, says literary agent Andrew Lownie, citing the length and complexity of film and television contracts (a typical contract from Universal is around 50 pages). In that contract, an author may not just be signing away the right to adapt a book but repeat fees, merchandising, DVD rights, even every character and storyline in the book or series could be up for discussion. They buy everything up titles, characters, stories for as long as they possibly can, Nick Marston says, who heads the film division of agency Curtis Brown. If authors do not get advice, the deal they sign may prevent future films being made if the original producer fails to get their project of the ground, he adds: I have been involved with so many projects where the rights have been all tied up in a deal and it stops anything being made.

Unwitting authors can also mistakenly sign away the right to make money from future books. Ive seen film contracts that have been drafted in a way that means they have been given publishing rights to the authors work, warns publishing contract consultant Stephen Aucutt.

After approaches from everyone from an Oscar-winning director to a Disney Channel producer, Jeff Rivera has gone it alone to launch a streamed TV show, I Got You, based on his self-published novels about LGBT life of the same name. Money was not the priority, he says; the rise of Netflix and social media convinced him to take creative control.

I have readers around the world in Spanish, Arabic and English-speaking countries, he added. Streamed television was an opportunity to reach a market hungry for LGBT content but denied it by local traditional routes. There are millions of Arabs who are LGBT or open-minded heterosexuals, who dont have access to anything through local traditional media so watch things through social media, he added. It is a real opportunity to tell my stories to more people.

But for others, it is all about the cash. Thriller writer Russell Blake, who has been approached by four large production companies in Hollywood for his Jet series, said he had never reached a suitable arrangement. Self-published authors run a risk of being sold cheap, he added. Im a whore. Show me the money.