Davos Newbies

The Financial Times has dumped Andrew Gowers as editor, in the kind of brutal change at the top that is very non-FT. I’d like to think Gowers lost his job because the paper used Amity Shlaes and Tyler Brulé as columnists under his tenure. I suspect, however, that the shift to long-time FT man Lionel Barber was occasioned by the deep, structural problems of the paper.

Gowers tried to perform a difficult balancing act. The vast bulk of the FT’s advertising revenue comes from the UK, but the majority of its circulation is now outside Britain. So he attempted to bolster the UK national edition – to turn it into the only paper readers would need – while also continuing its international expansion.

Strengthening the UK edition was a flop. There isn’t a tougher, more competitive national newspaper market than Britain, and the FT is probably the second-worst resourced to fight that battle (The Independent has even less, but it made the clever choice to lead the switch from broadsheet to tabloid, which at least temporarily distinguised it from the fray). Gowers was also trying to shore up the national edition at a time when business and market news had ceased to be compelling, as markets moved sideways for a few years.

Internationally, the picture was and is brighter. The FT set a goal of a 100,000 circulation in the US, which it has surpassed. But at those kind of levels, advertisers are going to remain decidedly cool about the paper. So the tension remained between the national/parochial advertising base, and the international/worldly circulation and content of the paper.

Why should a new editor make a difference? I suspect it won’t. Barber, like Gowers, is born and bred in the FT. So is everyone else on the paper. That is a strength in one sense, but it also means that the FT has as cloistered a culture as any Oxbridge college. There are FT ways of doing things, and no outside ideas ever intrude on those.

The reason I think there are strengths to the FT culture is that if outsiders ever came to dominate the executive, it would not retain its superior tone. It expects and demands sophistication from its readers, as The Economist does from its readers. Not coincidentally, The Economist also has a famously home-bred staff, and it is 50% owned by the FT’s parent, Pearson. The other side of the FT’s particular voice is it tends to be unaggressive journalistically. It doesn’t surprise me that I can’t remember an important story the FT has broken in the US. But it’s more worrying that it is hard to recall it breaking an important story in the UK.

I think the FT can build a decent global circulation over time. But that probably means something in the range of 600,000 (versus 439,000 today). It’s hard to see a daily building to The Economist’s 1 million. And I suspect even 1 million globally isn’t a great sell to advertisers in non-boom times. Advertisers want targeting, not coverage. Witness Google.

All that said, I have two papers on my desk this morning (and every morning). The FT and The Wall Street Journal. The FT is where I start my day because it keeps me focused on what’s most important in the world. Then I turn to the Journal, because – particularly since I’m now in the US – it keeps me in touch with US business news. But as I’ve learned over the years, my tastes are those of a comparatively small (wonderful and sophisticated, perhaps) market.

Update The FT’s own coverage of the change of editor makes some of my points clear. Gowers leaves after 22 years at the FT. Barber is a comparative spring chicken with only 20 years at the FT. I hope, incidentally, that it was Gowers and not Barber who was responsible for the regularly ridiculous front page splashes in the US edition of non-newsworthy interviews with major business figures. Since Barber was managing editor of the US edition, I’m not hopeful.

Richard Edelman on the current, ludicrous Forbes anti-blog cover story:

The Forbes cover story in the November 14 edition, titled, “Attack of the Blogs! They Destroy Brands and Wreck Lives Is There Any Way To Fight Back?” is a stunning attempt to create a parallel reality. In a style reminiscent of former President Richard Nixon, the article skewers the blogosphere as “the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns.”

Is this the beginning of an effort to deposition blogs? Is it simply a case of Forbes trying to take an opposite stand from Business Week, which published a very positive article, “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” in the May 2, 2005 edition? Whatever the motive, the takeaway for corporate executives is beware the blogosphere, because as the article states, “The combination of massive reach and legal invulnerability makes corporate character assassination easy to carry out.” This is exactly the wrong message at the wrong time.

I increasingly find myself turning to Political Arithmetik for guidance on matters political.

Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, exposes the often-wrong conclusions of Conventional Wisdom through his clear graphs and explanations. He has had two posts recently on the so-called second term presidential jinx. The first shows how few data points there are, and even with those, the results are ambiguous.

It is hard to argue that 3 out of 5 cases constitute a clear pattern of poor second terms. Rather it looks like a toss up.

There is another problem with the second term jinx argument: it ignores those presidents who had a first term “jinx” and never got to serve the second term. Recognizing this selection bias in second term jinxes wipes out any remaining argument for systematic decline in the second term.

We have five postwar presidents with 2nd terms (not counting Bush) three of whom do clearly worse in the second term. Compare that with the four ONE term postwar presidents who had such bad first terms they couldn’t win reelection. (Johnson, and Ford are special cases, neither initially elected but both eligible for another term). So it looks to me like four presidents had “jinxes” in the first term, and three of five had “jinxes” in the second term. It isn’t a jinx.

When you do bad in the first term, you don’t get to have a second. When you do ok in the first, there is still a just about even chance (3/5) that the second term is worse than the first. I conclude there is no systematic difference between first and second terms, at least in presidential approval ratings.

The second post expands the argument.

So, if the second term is not generally worse than the first in mean or median approval, and the second term is not generally more variable than the first (2 of 5 are more variable), and if in the face of scandal some presidents can rebound (Reagan and Clinton), though others resign (Nixon) I think we should say that, at least when it comes to public opinion, there is precious little evidence to support commentary which presumes a systematically worse second term than first.

It’s so wonderful to find someone who looks dispassionately at the data, rather than parroting the notion that all presidential second terms are a disaster. And there’s the bonus of the great information graphics. Definitely right at the top of my reading list these days.

Joel Spolsky provides a valuable lesson even for those of us not in the software industry: “It’s easy to spend on marketing and PR, since that just takes cash, but it’s hard to spend on software development, because that actually takes time and talent.”

Every business has the part that takes time and talent, where intelligent spending is hard. Joel doesn’t seem to make the distinction between intelligent spending and dumb spending, which is always easy, but I think it’s implied in his statement. Wearing my editor’s hat, I’ve always found it difficult to find enough good journalists to lavish my money on. There are times when I’d like to spend more money, but I just can’t find the right person, with the time to do it.

It’s a small thing I know, but I think one of the great glories of Britain is Araucaria’s alphabetical crosswords.

Perhaps a half dozen times a year, the greatest of Guardian crossword setters provides an extra dose of ingenuity. Solvers have to figure out the answers to clues and fit them, jigsaw puzzle style, into the grid. The one thing helping the solver is that Araucaria provides the first letter of each answer (letters A to Z, hence the name).

If you like this sort of thing — and I used to eagerly open my Saturday Guardian in the hope that this week would be the alphabetical — you won’t need to look up araucaria.