Walled City Media LLC
Richard McGill Murphy is an experienced journalist and editorial strategist with expertise in entrepreneurship, technology, organizational culture, emerging markets and lifestyle. As a seasoned international correspondent and Oxford-trained anthropologist with field experience in South Asia, Murphy brings an ethnographic, data-driven sensibility to the media business.
Earlier in his career, Murphy served as a top editor at Fortune Small Business magazine (FSB) and its online partner, CNNMoney.com. From 2008 to 2009 he served as FSB’s managing editor, driving the magazine and the site’s coverage of global entrepreneurship for one million print subscribers and some nine million monthly unique visitors online. In 2009, FSB won multiple journalism awards, was the best-performing magazine in its category, and increased its market share by 10% against direct competitors Inc. and Entrepreneur.
More recently, Murphy served as Chief Content Officer for Social Media Today. In this role he directed editorial content and strategy at an award-winning network of 10 blogging sites dedicated to aspects of business and public policy, including fast-growth entrepreneurship, energy policy, and urban planning. He managed a team of 10 site moderators, designers and other staff, and an extended network of about 1,800 independent bloggers. He was responsible for editorial standards, site design, and content partnerships across all sites. He also served as editorial and program director at the Committee to Protect Journalists (cpj.org), a human rights organization that fights for press freedom worldwide. In this role he ran a newsroom that covered press freedom abuses in more than 120 countries. Murphy led CPJ’s transformation into a digital advocacy organization. Under his leadership, web traffic grew tenfold and cpj.org became the world’s leading destination for breaking news and analysis of press freedom issues. Murphy started his journalism career as a freelance reporter in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Since then he has reported from Asia, the Middle East and all over North America for a variety of print, online and broadcast media, including Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The Times of London, Town & Country, the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and VH1. Murphy earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University, based on two years of field research in Pakistan, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in comparative literature. Murphy lives in Wilton, Connecticut with his wife and three children.