Media: The challenges still facing the Financial Times (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
As honeymoon periods go, Lionel Barber could barely have hoped for better. Four months after becoming editor of the Financial Times, he woke up yesterday to headlines about its return to profit after four years, its website's continued subscription growth, and a 12 per cent overall rise in revenues already this year. With circulation beginning to edge upwards, and the potentially catastrophic Collins Stewart libel battle recently settled, insiders were even identifying signs of a much-needed boost in staff morale. Could the pink'un have finally turned a corner?
Pearson, the paper's owner, clearly wants the City to think so. "My aim is just to get the FT back to serious profit," Marjorie Scardino, its chief executive, reassured shareholders while announcing the group's preliminary 2005 results on Monday. Since Andrew Gowers's sudden departure as editor over "strategic differences" last November, the Barber regime, Scardino suggested, now had a firm purpose: "to get back to its heartland of business and finance". The new editor was, after all, the man she had credited with the "vision, talent and experience" to lead it to a more certain future.
Yet just how much difference has Barber himself made? The Evening Standard spoke to a number of current and recent Financial Times journalists, offering a guarantee of anonymity, in order to gauge their thoughts on his initial impact. Overall, they identified a notable drive to tighten editorial standards, a renewed emphasis on serving the core UK business readership, and a welcome retreat from some of the paper's "wayward" non-business expansion under Gowers.
But for all his visibility in the newsroom, there remains concern that Barber, with his strong background in foreign news, has still to decide if his focus is global or British. As one executive says: "We're still riding two horses."
Rival papers have identified this lack of focus as a market opportunity. The Times and The Daily Telegraph in particular have invested in their UK City coverage, to the extent that, according to the most recent British Business Survey, The Times is now read by 95 per cent more business people than the FT. The paper was also criticised as unreliable under Gowers, with whom Andrew Neil, publisher of the rival The Business, publicly crossed swords after suggesting that the FT could no longer be called "the City's bible".
Pearson shareholders, meanwhile, have been calling for the paper to be sold so as to avoid distracting management from the group's more profitable arms. The FT may have made £2 million profit last year on sales of £221 million, but that's a mere afterthought when compared with Pearson's £2.7 billion education business. Calls for a sell-off were repeated this week by Richard Marwood of shareholder Axa Investment Managers, who complained that the paper "takes up a lot of management time relative to its value to the group".
Scardino has previously said that she would sell only "over my dead body". Hence the pressure on Barber, the paper's 50-year-old former US managing editor, to restore the paper's influence in the City.
"Lionel's heart is in restoring a vision of the FT that was around in the late Nineties," says one executive. "He's quite focused, aiming quite consciously and confidently at reaching the elite players. He's sensitive to accusations that his background is very international" - Barber was previously based in Washington and Brussels - "which is why he's appointed Martin Dickson [editor of the Lombard column] as his deputy, someone-the City knows and respects. It's a signal internally, too, to the second section that one of their own is at the top table, which wasn't the case under Andrew."
Another clear Barber signal has been an insistence that editorial standards must improve, particularly in the context of the embarrassing Collins Stewart climbdown. "Everyone's on notice that they need to raise their game journalistically," one staffer says. "It feels like his presence is running through the place, more than under Gowers. Certainly, he has strong views on everything from headlines and intros to the pictures used. You could say he's a bit more authoritarian."
Barber moved back to London only in January, so it is a little early to divine his ultimate strategy (he declined to talk to the Standard, and the Financial Times press office said it would not comment on "the speculation of the staff"). But early appointments, from Dow Jones and BreakingViews, suggest a greater focus on UK company news. The early pages already have a stronger domestic business focus, with Vodafone leading yesterday's paper - unlike the political or international stories that found greater favour under Gowers.
"He's looking for stories that might be more relevant to his core readers, rather than the 'aren't we clever, we've got an advanced leak of Government propaganda' stories that you used to get," observes a rival newspaper's senior business writer. "But he has a serious disadvantage - he's been out of the country for several years."
If he is to transform the FT's UK prospects, he cannot afford to wait long. Although it claims a global circulation of 441,840, full-price domestic sales were just 91,216 in January. One former colleague questions whether, even if he develops a clear strategy, Barber now has the time to turn things around.
"He seems to want to go back to five years ago, but then you didn't have the same competition from Bloomberg or Reuters," the ex-colleague says. "Meanwhile, a lot of good FT writers have left [under Barber], and still nobody's being very clear about whether it should be a global business paper or a British business paper, or some sort of global geopolitical general-interest paper, which is closer to what Lionel represents. What we're seeing is a little bit of good PR, a few sticking plasters, and a compromise arrangement to keep things going by turning back to the Nineties, when what it needs is really brave leadership. If the FT doesn't reinvent itself more courageously, it's not going to work."
And should that prove to be the case, then the shareholders will clamour ever more forcefully for Pearson to dispose of it, over Dame Marjorie's dead body or not.
(Evening Standard, March 1 2006)
As honeymoon periods go, Lionel Barber could barely have hoped for better. Four months after becoming editor of the Financial Times, he woke up yesterday to headlines about its return to profit after four years, its website's continued subscription growth, and a 12 per cent overall rise in revenues already this year. With circulation beginning to edge upwards, and the potentially catastrophic Collins Stewart libel battle recently settled, insiders were even identifying signs of a much-needed boost in staff morale. Could the pink'un have finally turned a corner?
Pearson, the paper's owner, clearly wants the City to think so. "My aim is just to get the FT back to serious profit," Marjorie Scardino, its chief executive, reassured shareholders while announcing the group's preliminary 2005 results on Monday. Since Andrew Gowers's sudden departure as editor over "strategic differences" last November, the Barber regime, Scardino suggested, now had a firm purpose: "to get back to its heartland of business and finance". The new editor was, after all, the man she had credited with the "vision, talent and experience" to lead it to a more certain future.
Yet just how much difference has Barber himself made? The Evening Standard spoke to a number of current and recent Financial Times journalists, offering a guarantee of anonymity, in order to gauge their thoughts on his initial impact. Overall, they identified a notable drive to tighten editorial standards, a renewed emphasis on serving the core UK business readership, and a welcome retreat from some of the paper's "wayward" non-business expansion under Gowers.
But for all his visibility in the newsroom, there remains concern that Barber, with his strong background in foreign news, has still to decide if his focus is global or British. As one executive says: "We're still riding two horses."
Rival papers have identified this lack of focus as a market opportunity. The Times and The Daily Telegraph in particular have invested in their UK City coverage, to the extent that, according to the most recent British Business Survey, The Times is now read by 95 per cent more business people than the FT. The paper was also criticised as unreliable under Gowers, with whom Andrew Neil, publisher of the rival The Business, publicly crossed swords after suggesting that the FT could no longer be called "the City's bible".
Pearson shareholders, meanwhile, have been calling for the paper to be sold so as to avoid distracting management from the group's more profitable arms. The FT may have made £2 million profit last year on sales of £221 million, but that's a mere afterthought when compared with Pearson's £2.7 billion education business. Calls for a sell-off were repeated this week by Richard Marwood of shareholder Axa Investment Managers, who complained that the paper "takes up a lot of management time relative to its value to the group".
Scardino has previously said that she would sell only "over my dead body". Hence the pressure on Barber, the paper's 50-year-old former US managing editor, to restore the paper's influence in the City.
"Lionel's heart is in restoring a vision of the FT that was around in the late Nineties," says one executive. "He's quite focused, aiming quite consciously and confidently at reaching the elite players. He's sensitive to accusations that his background is very international" - Barber was previously based in Washington and Brussels - "which is why he's appointed Martin Dickson [editor of the Lombard column] as his deputy, someone-the City knows and respects. It's a signal internally, too, to the second section that one of their own is at the top table, which wasn't the case under Andrew."
Another clear Barber signal has been an insistence that editorial standards must improve, particularly in the context of the embarrassing Collins Stewart climbdown. "Everyone's on notice that they need to raise their game journalistically," one staffer says. "It feels like his presence is running through the place, more than under Gowers. Certainly, he has strong views on everything from headlines and intros to the pictures used. You could say he's a bit more authoritarian."
Barber moved back to London only in January, so it is a little early to divine his ultimate strategy (he declined to talk to the Standard, and the Financial Times press office said it would not comment on "the speculation of the staff"). But early appointments, from Dow Jones and BreakingViews, suggest a greater focus on UK company news. The early pages already have a stronger domestic business focus, with Vodafone leading yesterday's paper - unlike the political or international stories that found greater favour under Gowers.
"He's looking for stories that might be more relevant to his core readers, rather than the 'aren't we clever, we've got an advanced leak of Government propaganda' stories that you used to get," observes a rival newspaper's senior business writer. "But he has a serious disadvantage - he's been out of the country for several years."
If he is to transform the FT's UK prospects, he cannot afford to wait long. Although it claims a global circulation of 441,840, full-price domestic sales were just 91,216 in January. One former colleague questions whether, even if he develops a clear strategy, Barber now has the time to turn things around.
"He seems to want to go back to five years ago, but then you didn't have the same competition from Bloomberg or Reuters," the ex-colleague says. "Meanwhile, a lot of good FT writers have left [under Barber], and still nobody's being very clear about whether it should be a global business paper or a British business paper, or some sort of global geopolitical general-interest paper, which is closer to what Lionel represents. What we're seeing is a little bit of good PR, a few sticking plasters, and a compromise arrangement to keep things going by turning back to the Nineties, when what it needs is really brave leadership. If the FT doesn't reinvent itself more courageously, it's not going to work."
And should that prove to be the case, then the shareholders will clamour ever more forcefully for Pearson to dispose of it, over Dame Marjorie's dead body or not.
(Evening Standard, March 1 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, March 01, 2006
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