Marc Frons

Frons worked at Dow Jones & Company from 2003 until 2006 as vice president and chief technology officer for its Consumer Media Group, responsible for online product development and applications. Before that, he worked at AOL Time Warner from January 2002 to June 2003, first as vice president and general manager of AOL Personal Finance and then as consulting editor for CNN Money.

From 1995 to early 2002, Frons was editor and chief technology officer of SmartMoney.com, one of the first financial periodical websites. In 1998, they launched The Map of The Market designed by Martin M. Wattenberg. The Map used a variant of the "treemap" technique pioneered by Ben Shneiderman. The screen is divided into rectangular tiles that represent publicly traded companies. The area of a rectangle corresponds to the market capitalization of the company, and the color tells you how the stock price has changed since the previous market close. Unlike a traditional treemap, however, the Map of the Market introduced a new algorithm designed to create tiles that were close to square, making for a display that is more legible and easier to interact with. (It turns out that several others, including Jarke van Wijk, independently invented similar algorithms around the same time.)

Frons started his career as a journalist while he pursued a B.A. degree in psychology from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1977, where he was campus correspondent for The New York Times. Upon graduation, he went on to be a stringer for The Times when he worked for a few months at a small paper in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He began his career at Newsweek in 1979, going on to hold a variety of senior editor positions at Business Week from 1984 until 1995. It was then that he started one of the first financial Web sites (SmartMoney.com), where he held the unusual title of editor and chief technology officer.

Marc Frons (born April 2, 1956) is the former Chief Technology Officer of News Corp. He was named to the role in May 2017 after serving in an interim capacity since October 2016. Prior to that he was SVP, Deputy Head of Technology and Global Head of Mobile Platform at the company. Mr. Frons was previously Chief Information Officer of the New York Times and former head of both NYTimes.com Digital Technology and The Times's corporate systems and technology. From July 2006 to March 2012, Mr. Frons served as the Chief Technology Officer of the New York Times. Since 2006, he has overseen technology and product development at NYTimes.com while continuing to be involved in broader digital strategy initiatives at the company. Before he joined The Times, Mr. Frons was the chief technology officer for The Wall Street Journal Online and other Dow Jones consumer Web sites. He is credited for the development of Map of the Market, an innovative financial data visualization interface for smartmoney.com and more recently the latest advancements in the customization algorithms that introduce readers to content based on their archived readings as well as the influx of interactivity within a media rich foundation of NYTimes.com.