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.