The Financial Times and the Future of Journalism

What I've found looking at the Financial Times is that it's among the media sources at the very top of my list based on mentions of the Foreign Policy's top 100 global thinkers mentions. Its sister publication, The Economist, does even better. The only publication doing better yet is The New York Times, though its results are exceptionally skewed by references to Paul Krugman (a Times columnist and blogger).

The results are based on searches for the names of the FP global thinkers members, and was a bit of research I'd conducted for my own benefit looking for sources of potentially interesting discussion and insight online, including social media, mainstream and altnernative publications, academic, and other institutions.

Not a subscriber, though I'm considering it.

Details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

Going to try to apply the £1/$1/€1 trial subscription to my startup - at 80% conversion, it sounds worth a shot, even if it's nowhere near there. The idea of forcing a small commitment seems solid, and is far from new.

Good writing.

Creative writing.

And delivering this multiple ways. They have an audience that works at multiple levels.

Universities - Send free or hugely discounted copies of the newspaper to universities or departments with people likely to stick to their content.

Free giveaways - Station people at underground stations across London with copies. It's more attractive than Metro.

Corporate subscription - If a company buys unmetered access for all staff, this is really habit building, and lets people explore. Aside from the above, this is how I was hooked not to give it up, as the value becomes enforced via exploring. This is very similar to the point the article makes "The idea is that for a nominal amount you can read as much as you like, and that creates a habit."

Editorial - Reflects this. It is not 'city boy' speak. It makes efforts of similar publications' business sections look like shoddily written and put together opinion pieces appeasing their respective editors across a spectrum of readers. [I'd contrast this to The Economist which often lacks the quality The FT has for insight. In many cases it is FT Lite.]

Actually useful - Walk around a bank and not see a copy. When working in a job in the City it was encouraged for new hires to include it (and other sources) in daily/weekly brainstorming meetings. This includes toilet breaks sitting reading the FT while putting the world to rest.

A lot of content is actually free - A lot of the non-daily-news sections are always free online. Particularly editorial, multimedia, things via RSS (they still do RSS).

Clearly I'm sold. The reasons above are why. Tangentially, they seem to have very low staff turnover and a clear vision and culture for achieving their vision.

I'm surprised and disappointed at the quality of reporting here by Cassidy, and the quality of the quotes by the FT's CEO Ridding. Cassidy is playing softball, letting the executive get away with the usual corporate propaganda:

“Number one is they are fundamentally supportive and excited by the strategy,” Ridding said. “Like us, they believe in the value of quality journalism, both as a mission and also as a business. They also think the language of business is English, and if you are going to be a global player you need a strong English-language position, or voice, or publication. So it made perfect sense from their strategic global perspective.”

Seriously? Are we supposed to read this and think it's news? News organizations are sometimes guilty of a certain hypocrisy, going easier on themselves, and each other, while they treat the rest of the world with more skepticism.

I'm on and off their subscription for a couple of years now. What I noticed is that they make it extremely challenging to cancel. While that doesn't matter for the first subscription it certainly is something that makes me hesitate to come back to them. In the end their journalism usually wins me over, though :)

They implemented shareware.