FT off the rails

Today’s lead story in the US edition of the Financial Times is US army looks to leave Iraq. A sensational scoop, if there were any particular basis to the story.

It’s based on comments from Major General Douglas Lute, director of operations at US Central Command. When you actually read what he says, it is hedged in a bunch of ways: it depends on improvements in Iraqi forces, on the Sunnis being engaged in the political process, on successful elections. In other words, it’s contingent on just about everything going right in a place where just about everything is going wrong.

Lute concludes: “I will tell you this, as the operations officer of Centcom, if a year from now I’ve got to call on all those army troops that Gen Schoomaker is prepared to provide [Schoomaker, army chief of staff, said last week that troop levels could be maintained until 2009], I won’t feel real good about myself.” Of course it’s a God-given right for Americans to feel good about themselves. But Lute could well be disappointed in 12 months.

It would be wrong to think there’s no one home at the FT during the August holidays. Their US lead story is completely buried on the FT.com website. I’ll guess an editor with brains saw that it was part of the usual back and forth jabber of various different senior officers in a difficult, changeable war. There are more and more days, however, where I wonder about the news judgment at the FT. At the same time, there is no better source for global economic and financial news. I suspect they are desperate to have a front page that distinguishes itself from the Wall Street Journal in the US market. They should be careful of trying too hard.

5 thoughts on “FT off the rails

  1. Felix

    Lance, haven’t you worked it out yet? Big front-page placement = exclusive interview, even if there isn’t any news. The logic: “Hey! We got so-and-so to talk to us! We should put him on the front page! Great! But he didn’t say anything! So let’s just gussy up a striking headline anyway! Yay!” Of course, this doesn’t serve readers or enhance the FT’s reputation at all, so I don’t know why they do it. But I think it’s as an incentive for FT journalists to try and get those big names to talk to them: Get the bigshot, and we’ll put you on the front page. Very misguided, in my view, since in my experience you get much better information, usually, from people a couple of rungs down the ladder.

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  2. Lance Knobel Post author

    I do get it, Felix. And I agree with your analysis. But as an FT reader of 20 years standing, I expect more of them. And if, as you note, “this doesn’t serve readers or enhance the FT’s reputation”, then it’s a commercially suicidal policy.

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  3. Felix

    OK, this is entirely speculation, but bear with me.

    The FT wants to make a go of it in the US, but its staffing here is a fraction of the WSJ’s. (Its delivery is crap too: it can’t even deliver to large chunks of downtown Manhattan.) The WSJ covers the entire country in an attempt to be exhaustive: if it’s important news, the Journal wants it. That kind of coverage would be prohibitively expensive for the FT — and even if they had it, they would essentially only be replicating a product which already exists.

    So the FT decides that it will stand out, distinguish itself, by providing content which no one else has. If news is a commodity, then the FT will provide exlusive access to important people on a regular basis, and will put that on the front page because that’s something it has and no one else has. It’s a reason to buy the FT.

    One thing that UK newspapers know very well is that the public never learns, when it comes to the old bait-and-switch. You put a big provocative headline on the front page and people will want to read the paper, even if it turns out half or even 80% of the time that there’s really no substance behind that headline.

    What the FT needs more than anything else is more US potential readers wanting to read the paper. And attention-grabbing headlines are a very easy, very cheap, and very effective way of doing that. Does it harm the FT’s franchise in the long term? Maybe, although since the franchise barely exists in this country to begin with, it’s hard to see how it can really be harmed that much. The FT needs to increase its US circulation, and it doesn’t have the budget or the time to do it through solid and exhaustive reporting over a period of many years. So it’s going down this route instead. So long as the inside pages remain up to normal FT standards, I’ll just start reading the paper on page 2 instead of page 1, and let the headlines subsidise my FT habit.

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  4. Lance Knobel Post author

    If true, it’s sad. But I fear it’s true.

    In national terms the FT may have a very small circulation in the US. But for the FT, over 100,000 purchasers in the US is very, very good indeed (that’s about a quarter of the global circulation).

    The commercial folks at the FT might cry about it, but the reality is that any serious reader needs both the FT and the WSJ to follow the world. I’ll guess that an overwhelming percentage of US FT readers also get the WSJ. To my mind, the FT should stop pretending it can compete with the Journal for core US business coverage and make its global span the whole reason to read it. No one who is domestically blinkered would dream of getting the FT anyway.

    Incidentally, the commercially tricky thing for the FT is that although the UK now is only one-third of its circulation, it still produces the vast, vast bulk of its ad revenue. All that “world’s business newspaper” guff isn’t worth a hill of beans in ad revenue. And that UK circulation — which produces the revenue — is in long, historic decline. The problem is that increasing UK circulation probably means becoming more parochial (appealing to the bald-headed man in Birmingham), which would alienate the two-thirds of the circulation outside the UK — and probably a good chunk of the circulation in the City of London.

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  5. Felix

    Right, and in any case increasing UK circulation would be very difficult — even if you did try to appeal to bald brummies, there’s no guarantee they would buy the paper. The FT has made its decsion already, that it’s going for global business types — which seems like a good decision to me. But global includes the US, and the US has its own unique set of problems, not least in distribution. The FT needs to be in the US, but it also needs to be big enough in the US that it can afford the enormous costs associated with timely distribution in a continent-sized country. And there’s the rub, I fear: in a country where only 15% of the population has a passport (or whatever the number is), if its global span is the whole reason to read the FT, then the FT is not going to reach that critical mass.

    On the other hand, the Atlantic’s circulation is up over 500,000, which makes me think that there’s still room for a lot of growth in the FT’s subscription numbers. As a famous Euromoney lede once put it (before it got edited out, unfortunately), “the world is becoming increasingly global”.

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