In its 125th year, the FT’s editor Lionel Barber has announced a new strategy to ensure the paper remains in the “the business of quality journalism”. Hitherto it might have been assumed that would mean that news would be front and centre, but the significant change for the paper is that the ‘network’ is the new currency. The Financial Times is “moving from a news business to a networked business”. Barber has seen his Silicon Valley spawned competitors “harnessing technology to revolutionise the news business through aggregation, personalisation and social media.” His response is to commit to digital first embracing the ways in which “the internet offers new avenues and platforms for the richer delivery and sharing of information”. It’s all in the network.
In practical terms the FT will switch focus away from print towards online, move quicker and restructure teams to be able to do all this better. The paper is seeking 35 redundancies as resource is stripped from night production to be invested in digital jobs. Newspaper editions around the globe are to be streamlined and increasingly harmonised. The logical conclusion from this process is that in time there will be one single international print edition. Lionel Barber’s full memo is available on the Media Guardian here.
