The FT's chief executive on AI, "loyalist" readers, and its U.S. expansion | Hacker News Reader

The FT's chief executive on AI, "loyalist" readers, and its U.S. expansion

niemanlab.org

34 pointsjyunwai50 comments

I’m a long-time FT reader. It’s certainly a finance paper at heart, which means a certain cold calculus in its outlook of the world. But unlike, say, Bloomberg, it also writes about culture and food and pop music, interviews artists, takes books seriously, even has a lively fashion section.

So for Americans, maybe it’s like Bloomberg via the New Yorker set in London (making regular trips to the continent).

I have to say, the FT has a bizarre blind spot that it shares with almost all other UK media: trans rights. They write about trans people with tones and assumptions that remind of how gays were treated in media in the 1970s. Recently the FT interviewed Judith Butler, and wasted a lot of time (hers and the readers’) on nonsense like “aren’t trans women rapists”.

But at least they made the effort to interview someone like Judith Butler, who is outside of the comfort zone of their readership. The WSJ wouldn’t do that.

Reposting a comment I made about a month ago about the FT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39177792

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Late last year, I signed up for a daily delivery of a physical copy of The Financial Times. I rarely read news websites, other than HN and Reddit. Why? Because I wanted to be informed about world events but dislike the always-on nature of online news, and because I have a certain romantic ideal of reading the morning newspaper with a cup of coffee. Unfortunately it doesn't arrive in the morning and usually comes around noon.

How has it been? Both good and bad. I do like having a physical paper put in the mailbox, as it's fun to look forward to a "delivery" every day that is more real than just looking at my phone.

On the other hand, I find the FT to be worth reading only about every other issue, largely because there simply isn't enough news to report in 24 hours. The opinion and editorial sections make up a decent portion of the paper and largely aren't worth reading. But, every other issue or so, there are a few excellent articles absolutely worth the price of admission. And even then, the quality of the "boring" articles is leaps and bounds above what I used to read in the NYT or the Guardian.

I'm not sure if I'll be renewing it later this year, as it does feel like I'm wasting a lot of paper – but only on the days when I don't enjoy the articles. I wish they had a twice weekly edition, which would be the perfect interval IMO.

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Since then, my opinion has only been solidified. I find their opinion takes to be pretty boilerplate predictable and not very thoughtful. I guess I'd only recommend it if you want a robust overview of daily business news. Otherwise, their general news articles are nothing special. But, they are still much less biased than the NYT, which is what I'm most familiar with.

I wonder what your review of the WSJ would be :-)

It's sad to think how many people respect their editorial board articles - so low rent.

I honestly haven't read much of the WSJ, but from the little I have, it seems less professional and more opinionated than the FT. Both are better than the NYT though IMO.

WSJ has a few high quality articles and some local insight into things like commercial real estate in the US but that editorial section is so difficult to take seriously (as well as some of the real articles). It's generally not worth it unless you get a deal.

NYT is mixed but has that breadth of US news that's hard to find elsewhere. Also pretty affordable.

You might like your local business journals - they're usually part of a syndicate so get national and local news. For instance for Seattle: https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/

There are a handful of global news brands with readers that are willing/able to pay significant subscription fees for. FT is one of them but US readers mostly consider them the European WSJ and subscribe to the WSJ if they are willing to pay for that sort of thing.

I'm not sure the FT makes sense for US readers on a budget. Personally I do the NYT and Economist so it's not like I don't pay for news and commentary but that's probably about my limit.

> I'm not sure the FT makes sense for US readers on a budget.

As you note, they're inherently an upmarket brand like the WSJ not a blue collar read like the NY POST. Readers "on a budget" are probably not an interesting market for their sales-seeking advertisers or any influence-seeking investors or editors.

What they probably see is the endless fracturing of American media among its deep political fault lines and opportunity to position as a WSJ competitor with a more transatlantic and global angle on topics of US interest.

I split an FT subscription with a circle of Marxist friends. We couldn't care less about WSJ.

I’m about as left wing as they come. I would never pay for the WSJ because their standard reporting is so insanely biased toward American right wing politics as to rarely be of any specific value, relative to other sources. I do, however, pay for and read the Financial Times, because it’s the paper businesses rely on then to tell them the unvarnished realities of the world in which they operate, regardless of any political valences.

You probably have to distinguish the WSJ opinion/editorial pages from the news. There's definitely a conservative bias in editorial. (I know and have known a number of folks who have worked in that area.) But news seems pretty neutral in the context of the area where the paper plays.

No, it bleeds into their reporting as well. The NYTimes has the same problem, a right wing editorial department that is constantly interfering with and undermining their news coverage. The FT doesn’t have these problems.

If you think NYT has a right wing editorial department then you really are left wing as they come. I can only imagine how left wing FT's editorial department is.

Edit: assuming the parent wasn't changed, I misread it and I'm correcting this comment. Sorry.

Re: the NYT's editorial department:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661650

Who are you quoting? Why?

I think I misread your comment, unless you updated it. I updated mine.

I didn't update it. I am quoting GP in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661339

The WSJ opinion side is uniformly conservative and pro-GOP / anti-Dem/liberal.

The NYT is very different: They cover the spectrum, from Ross Douthat who is pretty far right, (edit: to David French, rational religious right) to Brett Stephens (former WSJ opinion page editor) to David Brooks (more center-right), and more. The notable exception is no pro-Trump writers, but they are not bound to publish lies and nonsense.

Progressives think the NYT is a corporate tool. I wonder what the far right thinks of the WSJ.

Having some visibility into the WSJ... it's conservative but not MAGA.

What does the MAGA and associated crowd think of the WSJ, if you happen to know?

Absent much visibility into the MAGA crowd, I suspect most view it as very corporatist vs. populist whether they articulate it as such or not.

That's pretty funny given the traditional knock on big paper journalism was how left-wing they were. (They were/are very mainstream whatever that means.)

As with our political parties, there are no left wing papers in the United States, at least not by the accounting of the median developed democracy. They may run individual stories of a particular bent, but the NYTimes overall is a right wing news source. One need only consider how they handled the Iraq War or pander to conservative moral panics around trans people for this to be obvious, and I’m speaking specifically to their so-called reporting on these issues, separate from the editorial department. The NYTimes is also wildly anti-union and routinely engages in intimidation tactics against its staff, eliminated their public oversight editor position, among many other egregious examples.

> pander to conservative moral panics around trans people

There are legitimate discussions to be had about whether the replacement of female-only spaces with therapeutic venues for gender-dysphoric males is a reasonable policy goal, particularly when the negative impacts upon women and girls is considered. It's not a "conservative moral panic" to have these discussions.

Editorials on WSJ are just insane. Straight reporting is often good but there definitely isn't a high wall between the two and the reporting gets impacted negatively unfortunately (not always though).

While I think it's natural to compare the FT and the WSJ, as someone who reads both regularly, they are not comparable. The FT is much more straight-facts in its reporting whereas the WSJ brings in a lot of bias/opinion from the political side.

WSJ is much cheaper than FT. I pay about 4x as much for FT as WSJ.

For anyone interested - I am a long-running subscriber to The Australian and get a free WSJ subscription as a side-effect of that. I have lived outside Australia for nearly twenty years. In that time, tried various papers, but came back to the oz as I find its foreign affairs coverage and international commentary better than anything else, and you get a WSJ subscription also. Its website does have some annoying and long-running quirks - for example they interpret middle-click as a left-click.

Looks like this business model is serving them quite well, compared to competitors. I work with news organizations and we have seen all kinds (for-profit, non-profit) taking a big hit in the last year. We did pilots with companies that had no concern about paying post-pilot, but then times got tight and they did layoffs. Pretty much everyone is just hunkering down right now. It's really surprising they're cutting so much, given that it's election season, when people are more likely to spend time reading the news.

Who is FT for, compared to other premium news outlets in the United States?

In the recent years I’ve been shopping around a news subscription, trying to avoid clickbait and thought bubbles. I don’t think I understand their target audience, even after reading the entire interview.

It's basically WSJ with a somewhat more global perspective, and Euro-centric instead of US-centric.

In my anecdotal experience, they're usually the first to scoop big Japanese business stories. (Some kind of Nikkei -> FT pipeline?)

Edit-

> It’s been owned by the Japanese company Nikkei, Inc. — an employee-owned company that publishes The Nikkei newspaper — since 2015.

Okay that makes sense now, haha.

Nikkei is employee-owned?! I need to look into this more!

> Nikkei is employee-owned?! I need to look into this more!

It's a Kabushiki gaisha (株式会社).

They aren't "employee-owned" in the progressive western sense (that's actually a "Cooperative") - it's just a joint stock company similar to McKinsey where employees can partake in limited profit sharing.

I'd love to adopt that myself, wonder if there's any good reading in English beyond the Wikipedia article...

And much softer, more centrist politics. WSJ is every bit a Murdoch paper

The op-ed pages were pretty conservative even pre-Murdoch. The FT is a lot like the WSJ but, as someone else commented, more global in perspective and with a more centrist editorial angle. (Probably more in line with The Economist but maybe even more so.)

Writing quality and critical thinking are double that of WSJ though.

One of the major sections on the front page is call "How to Spend It".

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Didn't you read the Financial Times this morning?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Never do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Well, you're a banker. Surely you read the Financial Times?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Can't understand it. Full of economic theory.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Why do you buy it?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Oh, you know, it's part of the uniform. Took me 30 years to understand Keynes' economics. Then when I'd just cottoned on, everyone started getting hooked on these new monetarist ideas, you know, "I Want To Be Free" by Milton Shulman.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Milton Friedman.

Sir Desmond Glazebrook : Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Maynard Keynes.

Sir Desmond Glazebrook : I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes.

Sir Humphrey Appleby : Yes, there is, but it's...

[Humphrey gives up]

Such a great show. So much of it still resonates

What show is this?

"Yes, Minister!" And "Yes, Prime Minister!"

And don‘t forget:

Sir Humphrey : The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.

Jim Hacker : Don't tell me about the Press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey : Oh, and Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley : Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.

> I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes.

I‘ve watched the series, and had no idea there‘s a city of that name!

How… why does it look like a given name and family name?

It's not a city in the conventional sense, more a collection of roundabouts without a soul. Never try to hitch-hike near Milton Keynes.

Weirdly, the village the town was built around had that name originally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleton,_Milton_Keynes

Milton is a contraction of Middleton & Keynes was from the Norman de Cahaines family. There are a few other X Keynes dotted around the UK, all presumably on lands gifted to the de Cahaines family after the Norman conquest.

Its perspective and focus is business, and is European. That can make it a good complement to leading US news sources such as the NYT.

FT is, IMHO, the most intellectually sophisticated daily newspaper in the world, ahead of the NYT. FT columnists are just about the only ones I see anywhere that have intellectual honesty and also sophistication that makes them worth reading. (In other publications, IMHO opinion columns of every political stripe are an exercise in spinning news to favor their 'constituency', and are transparently misleading to someone who is otherwise well-informed.)

> trying to avoid clickbait and thought bubbles

Check out Tangle — it's really good for this purpose.

People who care more about finance & economic analysis than they do about signalling political affiliation. There’s strong overlap with the WSJ in the USA I would imagine, except the WSJ is notoriously pro-Republican, whereas the FT has supported various UK parties across the political spectrum & the FT has a more internationalist focus.

They also really care about their Arts with a capital A reporting.

If you want a more eclectic approach to financial reporting, the FTAlphaville blog at ft.com/alphaville is free (registration signup required) & often well worth reading whether you read the main paper or not.

I tried FT and wanted to like it, but I felt it was a little too heavy on the doom and gloom.

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