Richard McGill Murphy is a journalist and strategy consultant. He currently writes for Fortune and Business Week and serves as managing partner of Walled City Media LLC, a media strategy firm that provides consulting services to corporate clients.
Murphy formerly worked as a top editor at Fortune Small Business magazine (FSB) and CNNMoney.com, both published by Time Warner. 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. Earlier in his career he 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 one hundred twenty countries.
Murphy studied literature at Harvard and earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. His dissertation, “Space, Class and Rhetoric in Lahore,” was a study of land use, social class, and politics in Pakistan’s second-largest city. During his time in Lahore, Murphy was a regular columnist for The Friday Times, a leading English-language weekly newspaper.