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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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