Gorkana meets Dan Bogler

22 February 2010 | written by Ciar Byrne

The view of the River Thames flowing past the glass façade of Dan Bogler’s Southwark Bridge office could be a metaphor for the Financial Times itself – tradition juxtaposed with modernity.

There is no doubt that the Managing Editor of the “Pink ‘Un” has his sights set firmly on the future.

Bogler, who first joined the FT in 1995 working for the Lex column, before climbing the ladder to reach his current post a decade later, is under no illusions about the challenges facing journalism, which he states is facing “the greatest crisis in a generation”. December 2009 was a terrible month for almost all UK newspapers, and the print edition of the FT was no exception: its circulation fell 6.46% year on year to 400,827.

But thanks in part to the FT’s early adoption of online charging, FT Publishing made a £14m profit in the first half of 2009 and continues to perform well. Content revenues at the newspaper group, or as Bogler prefers to call it, news organisation, are expected to overtake print advertising revenues for the first time in 2010. By 2012, it is predicted content revenues will outstrip advertising revenues altogether.

The impact of the “free is good” doctrine of the internet on the wider newspaper industry, combined with the cyclical downturn in advertising, has been “very, very serious”, Bogler warns.

Against a backdrop of metropolitan daily newspapers in the US going bust and “even a fantastic newspaper like the New York Times teetering”, while here in the UK newspapers are shedding staff and making significant losses, he describes the FT as “very lucky”.

“We, together with the Wall Street Journal and a couple of others are in a sizeable niche. People will pay for business, economics and financial news. If you produce high enough quality content, you can charge for it and you continue to make revenues, which you can reinvest in journalism. It’s a virtuous circle.”

Long before Rupert Murdoch announced his newfound zeal for reinstating value in newspaper content by placing it behind pay-walls, the FT embarked on a strategy which has seen the price of the print newspaper double over the last three years and online users required to pay if they want to click on more than a few articles a month.

The FT now has over 121,200 online subscribers, who pay £3.29 a week for standard subscription, or £4.99 for the premium service, plus more than 600 corporate subscribers, up 117% from last year. These include companies such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Slaughter & May, who buy a digital licence to receive FT content on whatever platform they choose – via FT.com, through their Blackberries or iPhones or a newspaper stand in their atrium.

“There are lots of bells and whistles, but the basic message is, if you receive our content, you pay for it,” explains Bogler.

Until two years ago, the FT had a deal with Factiva, the Dow Jones-owned business news and information service. Bogler reveals, “They controlled the end relationship with the customer and made lots of money out of it. We said ‘that’s not good, we’re not getting enough money from this and we don’t know who our customers are’. So as of April 2008, every corporate has to sign a direct relationship with the FT.”

Although the internet has had a disastrous impact on the economics of the newspaper industry, “swapping print dollars for digital dimes”, Bogler believes the web has had some positive effects on journalism.

“You get a lot of rubbish, but you also get new insights,” he says.” Over Christmas, British Airways staff were saying on their internal website ‘we don’t agree with the strike’. That’s real, need-to-know information leaking out in a way it never could before. In that sense the internet has been a great enabler.”

The FT’s editorial has changed in response to the rise of citizen journalism, with computer assisted reporting, a team producing up to 100 videos a month for FT.com, columnists’ blogs and initiatives such as the economists’ forum hosted by Martin Wolf, while readers can also easily comment on articles online.

But Bogler adds, “Our journalism has changed in a much more fundamental way, which is that the luxury of time has disappeared. Our audience wants to have instant news and almost instant views as well, and therefore our journalists are working in completely different ways.”

“When I first joined the FT on the Lex column, we used to go for lunch with a chief executive and then write something at four or five o’clock in the afternoon which was printed the next day. The second time I worked on the Lex column, I wrote my note between eight and ten in the morning and it was published by lunchtime.

“That has good and bad effects. It’s good for our readers to have an instant view on something that is potentially a market-moving story. On the other hand you’ve got to think that brilliant though I am, the amount of analysis and opinion that I can cobble together in two hours is less than what I could do in a full day.”

Much reporting these days tends to be done by phone or video conference rather than in person and when lunches do take place, Bogler jokes they are accompanied by water rather than wine. But the internet has in some respects made the reporter’s job easier, with company accounts posted online and websites springing up for disgruntled employees to air their views.

Public relations professionals can assist journalists by thinking in advance about multimedia elements to a story, Bogler advises. He adds, “I don’t just mean file photos of the CEO, but information that can be quickly presented graphically. We often take slides from a company’s power point presentation on their results and stick that on the website. Making sure that their clients are happy to go on video as well as being interviewed at a press conference, that all helps.”

The rest of the newspaper industry is now coming round to the idea that in order to survive they will have to charge for access to at least some online content, believes Bogler, although he qualifies this by saying, “Not everybody has reached that point psychologically. If you asked The Guardian, I think they would find it quite hard.”

He adds, “As I understand it, The Times is thinking of charging for some of its financial and markets coverage, a bit like us. They’re also thinking of whether they can do any sports applications. The Sun charges for its bingo line and it will charge for its Page Three girls. You’ll get little streams of revenue, but whether you’ll be able to put the Daily Telegraph behind a pay-wall, I doubt it.”

What newspapers like the FT can offer in this mass of information, he believes, is “trust and selection”. “If you read it on the FT’s website, you can trust it, we’ve got a seasoned reporter who has checked it out as opposed to a lot of the information on the internet, which might just be someone’s opinion.

“We don’t just throw everything up and say ‘here it is, pick your own’, we tell you ‘these are the three most important stories of the day that’s why they’re on our front page, this is the most important story, that’s why it’s leading our website’.”

The FT has also been keener than most to push print subscriptions. Bogler explains: “Received wisdom has been that a subscription is a bad thing because it’s at a cut price and you would much rather someone bought at retail and paid the full price for a newspaper.

“That’s a bit silly, because even if you give a discount on a subscription, you get your money in advance, and you know your customer, you have some of their demographic information and you can target them.”

Although the FT runs upmarket loyalty schemes such as “lunch for a fiver”, it has been careful to avoid CD and DVD giveaways. Bogler says, “With the Daily Mail sometimes you’re buying the CD and then you throw the paper away. We don’t do that, it loses money and doesn’t really encourage reader loyalty.”

He admits that if The Independent goes free, as it is widely rumoured it will if Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev buys the paper, it will damage sales of other quality newspapers. However, he adds, “a free Independent would be a problem, but not a disaster”.  News is already available free from the BBC and countless other sources, he argues. By going free, he believes The Independent will concentrate the minds of other newspapers about what they can charge for.

“More worrying is if your decline in revenue leads to cutting into your journalism,” he adds. The FT, he is keen to stress, still has a “fabulous international network” of 120 overseas journalists – many more than the Daily Telegraph or The Times, although still “tiny compared to the Bloombergs and Reuters of this world”.

“I don’t really compete against the Telegraph and the Times any more. I do still compete against the Wall Street Journal, but I’m really competing against Bloomberg and Reuters, which are moving to eat the FT’s lunch by adding comment and analysis and so on. Those are the people we’re worried about.”

Does he believe newspapers will still be around in ten or 20 years time? “I think in ten yes, because these changes, although they are dramatic, always proceed more slowly than you expect. In 20 year’s time, I’m not so sure that people will read anything that’s printed on paper. It may well be a newspaper formatted e-book, but people will always want to consume news in one form or another.”