Timothy Balding

Born in 1954 in London of mixed Scottish and English parentage, I grew up and was educated on a British military base in Germany. I left school and my family at the age of sixteen to return alone to the United Kingdom, where I was hired as a reporter on local newspapers in Reading in the county of Berkshire. For the ensuing decade, I worked on local and regional titles and then at Press Association, the national news agency, covering politics in Westminster, the British Parliament. I exiled myself to Paris, France, in 1980, and spent the next thirty years working for international, non-governmental organizations. For twenty-five of these, I was Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers, the representative global group of media publishers and editors, established after World War II to defend the freedom and independence of the press worldwide. A Knight (First Class) in the Order of the White Rose of Finland – an honour accorded me by Nobel Peace laureate Martti Ahtisaari, former Finnish President.