By Peter Preston: The crucial question is this: is the FT different or essentially the same?
When its increasingly cheery CEO, John Ridding, talks about the wonders of pay walls, fresh business models and rising profitability, is he outlining something all newspapers could do if they tried?
Or does being pink, business-specific and determinedly digital define the limits of broader ambition?
Well, niches and loads of corporate readers help. You can push up your weekday price from £1 to £2 over a couple of years and still see readership rising. You can build online walls that 121,000 subscribers are ready to climb (with a couple of hundred of more joining every day). You can flaunt subscriber reading times of 9.5 hours a month on a base up 22 percent year-on-year. But none of this is as simple as it seems…
Seven years ago, the Financial Times was losing £32m, its prospects as part of the Pearson (NYSE: PSO) group (or any other group) much in doubt. The grand vision of the 1990s
This article originally appeared in © Guardian News & Media Ltd..
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