The Financial Times (FT) is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is New York City-based Wall Street Journal. The FT has a global print circulation of 381,658. Along with FT.com, it has an average daily readership of 2.1 million people worldwide (PwC audited figures, November 2010). FT.com has 3.4 million registered users and 224,000 digital subscribers, as well as 605,402 paying users (2 October 2010 to 4 January 2011). FT Chinese has more than 1.5 million registered users.

Founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and Horatio Bottomley, the Financial Times competed with four other finance-oriented newspapers, in 1945 absorbing the last, the Financial News (founded in 1884). The FT specialises in UK and international business and financial news. Printed as a broadsheet on light salmon paper, the FT is the only paper in the UK providing full daily reports on the London Stock Exchange and world markets.

History

The FT was launched as the London Financial Guide on 9 January 1888, renaming itself the Financial Times on 13 February the same year. Describing itself as the friend of "The Honest Financier and the Respectable Broker", it was a four-page journal. The readership was the financial community of the City of London. The Financial Times established itself as the sober but reliable "stockbroker's Bible" or "parish magazine of the City", its only rival being the slightly older and more daring Financial News. In 1893, the FT turned light salmon to distinguish it from the similarly named Financial News. Also in the 1890's it also collaborated with Walter R Skinner in publishing series of years books and manuals regarding mining investment around the world.

In 1993, the FT printed a single edition on white to commemorate this change a hundred years earlier. The paper has sometimes been informally known as the "Pink Un". From initial rivalry, the two papers were merged by Brendan Bracken in 1945 to form a single six-page newspaper. The Financial Times brought a higher circulation while the Financial News provided editorial talent.

Over the years, the newspaper grew in size, readership and breadth of coverage. It established correspondents in cities around the world, reflecting early moves in the world economy towards globalisation. Pearson bought the paper in 1957.

As cross-border trade and capital flows increased during the 1970s, the FT began international expansion, facilitated by developments in technology and the growing acceptance of English as the language of business. On 1 January 1979, the first FT was printed outside the UK, in Frankfurt. Since then, with increased international coverage, the FT has become a global newspaper, printed in 22 locations with four international editions to serve the UK, continental Europe, the U.S., Asia and the Middle East.

The European edition is distributed in continental Europe and Africa. It is printed Monday to Saturday at five centres across Europe. Thanks to correspondents reporting from all the centres of Europe, the FT is regarded as the premier news source involving the European Union, the Euro, and European corporate affairs.

On 13 May 1995 the Financial Times group made its first foray into the online world with the launch of FT.com. This provided a high summary of news from around the globe and was supplemented in February 1996 with the launch of stock prices followed in spring 1996 by the second generation site. The site was funded by advertising and contributed to the online advertising market in the UK in the late 1990s. Between 1997 and 2000 the site underwent several revamps and changes of strategy as the FT Group and Pearson reacted to changes online. FT.com is one of the few UK news sites successfully operating on subscriptions. On 18 March 2009 the Financial Times launched newssift.com, a semantic search engine that sifts through business news.

In 1997, the FT launched the U.S. edition, printed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando and Washington, D.C., although the newspaper was first printed outside New York City in 1985. In April 2009, the FT's U.S. circulation was 143,473.

In September 1998, the FT became the first UK-based newspaper to sell more copies internationally than within the UK. Worldwide circulation stands at 421,059 with global readership estimated at over 1.4 million in more than 140 countries.

Since 2000, the FT has published a German language edition, Financial Times Deutschland, with its own news. Its circulation in 2003 was 90,000. Originally a joint venture between the FT and G+J of Germany, FT sold its 50% stake in Financial Times Deutschland to its German partner in January 2008.

The editor of the FT is Lionel Barber, who took over from Andrew Gowers in autumn 2005. In October 2006, the FT launched FT Alphaville, an Internet-based daily news and commentary service for financial professionals.

On 23 April 2007, the FT relaunched, with a new typeface, new labelling, but no reduction in paper size. This redesign has been billed as the “most dramatic revamp [of the FT] in a generation” and includes more panels in the news pages, more first page feature content in the “Companies and Markets” section, and sports content that is more squeezed to allow an extra foreign news page.

Changes include the reintroduction, above the leaders, of the FT's 1888 motto, “Without fear and without favour” and more signposts to FT.com. To coincide with the redesign, Pearson PLC announced an advertising campaign centred on the tag-line “We Live in Financial Times”, created by the agency DDB London. The FT redesign was handled by and was the first major project for design firm Shakeup Media and young American designer Ryan Bowman.

In 2009 it was incorporated into the Weekend City Press Review where summaries of the weekend FT papers are published, as well as twelve other leading national papers, on a weekly subscription basis.

Content

The Financial Times reports business and features share and financial product listings. About 110 of its 475 journalists are outside the UK. The FT is usually in two sections, the first section covers national and international news, the second company and markets news.

FT Magazine is a weekly magazine published with the Financial Times Weekend Edition. Elements are incorporated in the main newspaper for the USA weekend edition.

How to Spend It

How to Spend It is a weekly magazine published with the Financial Times Weekend Edition. Founded and launched By Ms Julia Carrick, its articles concern yachts, mansions, apartments, designs, horlogerie, haute couture, automobiles, as well as fashion and columns by individuals in the arts, gardening, food, and hotel and travel industries. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, FT launched the on-line version of this publication howtospendit.com on 3 October 2009.

Editorial stance

It advocates free markets and is in favour of globalisation. During the 1980s it supported Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's monetarist policies. However, it has aligned itself with Labour in the UK. It was also supportive of Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister. FT editorials tend to be pro-European Union. In the 2008 United States presidential election, the Financial Times endorsed Barack Obama. In the 2010 UK General Election the paper criticised the Conservative Party, but stated that on balance it would support them. In 2010, its competitor, The Wall Street Journal, dubbed the FT an "orthodox Keynesian company".

The Lex column

The Lex column is a daily feature on the back page of the first section. It features analyses and opinions covering business and financial topics and is global in scope. The FT calls Lex its agenda-setting column. The column first appeared on Monday, 1 October 1945. The origin of the name may stand for "Lex Mercatoria" a Latin expression meaning literally "merchant law". It was conceived by Hargreaves Parkinson for the Financial News in the 1930s and took it to the Financial Times when the two merged.

Lex boasts some distinguished alumni who have gone on to make careers in business and government – including Nigel Lawson (former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer), Richard Lambert (CBI director and former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee), Martin Taylor (former chief executive of Barclays), John Makinson (chairman and chief executive of Penguin), John Gardiner (former chairman of Tesco), David Freud (former UBS banker and Labour adviser, now a Conservative peer), John Kingman (former head of UKFI and a banker at Rothschild’s), George Graham (RBS banker), Andrew Balls (head of European portfolio management at PIMCO) and Jo Johnson (Conservative Member of Parliament for Orpington).

Ownership and related products

The Financial Times Group is a division of Pearson PLC. It includes the Financial Times, FT.com, FT Search Inc., the publishing imprint FT Press, a 50% shareholding in The Economist, Mergermarket (an online intelligence reporting family) and numerous joint ventures including Vedomosti in Russia. In addition, the FT Group has a unit called FT Business which is a provider of specialist information on retail, personal and institutional finance segments. It is a publisher of The Banker, Money Management and Financial Adviser (a publication targeted at professional advisers), This is Africa, fDi intelligence and Professional Wealth Management (PWM).

The Financial Times Group announced the beta launch of newssift FT Search, Inc. in March 2009. Newssift.com is a next generation search tool for business professionals indexing millions of articles from thousands of global business news sources, not just the FT. The Financial Times Group acquired Money Media (an online news and commentary site for the industry) and Exec-Appointments (an online recruitment specialist site for the executive jobs market). The FT Group had a 13.85% stake in Business Standard Ltd of India, the publisher of the Business Standard. FT Group has since sold this stake in April 2008 and has entered into an agreement with Network 18 to launch Financial Times in India, though it is speculated that they may find it difficult to do so, as the brand Financial Times in India is owned by The Times Group, the publisher of The Times of India and The Economic Times. The group also publishes America's Intelligence Wire, a daily general newswire service.

The Financial Times’ Financial Publishing division provides print and online content for consumer and professional financial audiences. Examples of publications and services include: Investors Chronicle, a personal finance magazine and website; FT Money, a weekly personal finance supplement in FT Weekend; FT Wealth, a magazine for the global high-net-worth community and FTfm, a weekly review of the global fund management industry. Money-Media, a separate arm of Financial Publishing, delivers a range of digital information services for fund management professionals around the globe, including: Ignites, Ignites Europe, Ignites Asia, FundFire and BoardIQ. Intelligence, includes publications and events for the European pensions industry (Pensions Management, Pensions Week and schemeXpert.com). Financial Publishing also provides local language services through Nordic Region Pensions & Investment News (nrpn), Nederlands Pensioen & Beleggingsnieuws (npn), Deutsche Pensions & Investmentnachrichten (dpn), Schweizer Pensions & Investmentnachrichten (spn), The group also publishes MandateWire, a financial information company that provides sales and market intelligence for US and European investment professionals.

FT Knowledge is an associated company which offers educational products and services. FT Knowledge has offered the "Introducing the City" course (which is a series of Wednesday night lectures/seminars, as well as weekend events) during the Autumn and Spring since 2000. '' FT Predict is a prediction market contest the Financial Times is hosting that allows users to buy and sell contracts based on future financial, political, and news-driven events by spending fictional Financial Times Dollars (FT$). Based on the assumptions displayed in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, this contest allows people to use prediction markets to observe future occurrences while competing for weekly and monthly prizes.

The Financial Times also ran a business related game called "In the Pink" (a phrase meaning "in good health", also a reference to the colour of the newspaper and to the phrase "in the red" meaning to be making a loss). The player is put in the virtual role of Chief Executive and the goal is to have the highest profit when the game closes. The winner of the game (the player who makes the highest profit) will receive a real monetary prize of £10,000. The game ran from 1 May to 28 June 2006.

Since 2005, the FT has sponsored the annual Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Indices

The Financial Times collates and publishes a number of financial market indices, which reflect the changing value of the constituents. The longest running being the former Financial News Index, started on 1 July 1935 by the Financial News. The FT published a similar index, which was replaced by the former which was renamed the Financial Times (FT) Index on 1 January 1947. The index started as an index of industrial shares and companies with dominant overseas interests such as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), British-American Tobacco, Lever Brothers (later Unilever) and Shell were excluded. The oil and financial sectors were included decades later.

The FTSE All-Share Index, the first one of the FTSE series of indices, was created in 1962, comprising the largest 594 UK companies by market capitalisation. The letters F-T-S-E represent that FTSE is a joint venture between the Financial Times (F-T) and the London Stock Exchange (S-E). On the 13 February 1984 the FTSE 100 was introduced, representing about 80 percent of the London Stock Exchange's value. In 1995 FTSE Group was made an independent company. The first of several overseas offices was opened in New York City in 1999, Paris in early 2000, and Hong Kong, Frankfurt, and San Francisco in 2001. Madrid was opened 2002, and Tokyo in 2003.

Other well-known FTSE indices include the FTSE 350 Index, the FTSE SmallCap Index, the FTSE AIM UK 50 Index and FTSE AIM 100 Index as well as the FTSE AIM All-Share Index for stocks, and the FTSE UK Gilt Indices for government bonds.

People

Lionel Barber (Editor)

Gillian Tett (US Managing Editor)

Lucy Kellaway (Management Columnist)

John Authers (Head of Lex)

Tim Harford (Senior Columnist)

Gideon Rachman (Chief International Affairs Commentator)

Martin Wolf (Chief Economics Commentator)

Jurek Martin (Columnist and former Washington Bureau Chief)

In July 2006, the FT announced a "New Newsroom" project to integrate the newspaper more closely with FT.com. At the same time it announced plans to cut the editorial staff from 525 to 475. In August, it announced that all the required job cuts had been achieved through voluntary layoffs.

A number of former FT journalists have gone on to high-profile jobs in journalism, politics and business. Robert Thomson, previously the paper's US managing editor, was the editor of The Times and is now the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Will Lewis, a former New York correspondent and News Editor for the FT, is the current editor of the Daily Telegraph. Dominic Lawson went on to become editor of the Sunday Telegraph until he was sacked in 2005. Andrew Adonis, a former education correspondent, became an adviser on education to Tony Blair, who was the British prime minister, and was given a job as an education minister and a seat in the House of Lords after the 2005 election. Ed Balls became chief economic adviser to the Treasury, working closely with Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer (or finance minister) before being elected as a Member of Parliament in 2005, and has been Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families since July 2007. Bernard Gray, a former defence correspondent and Lex columnist, was chief executive of publishing company CMP before becoming chief executive of TSL Education, publisher of the Times Educational Supplement. David Jones, at one time the FT Night Editor, then became Head of IT. He was a key figure in the newspaper's transformation from hot metal to electronic composition and then onto full-page pagination in the 1990s. He went onto become Head of Technology for the Trinity Mirror Group.

Sir Geoffrey Owen was Editor, Financial Times, 1981–1990. Thereafter he joined the London School of Economics – Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) as Director of Business Policy in 1991 and was appointed Senior Fellow, Institute of Management, in 1997. He continues his work there. During his tenure at the FT he had to deal with rapid technological change and issues related to it, for example, repetitive strain injury (RSI) issue which affected dozens of FT journalists, reporters and staff in the late 1980s.

Editors

:1888: Leopold Graham :1889: Douglas MacRae :1890: William Ramage Lawson :1892: Sydney Murray :1896: A. E. Murray :1909: C. H. Palmer :1937: D. S. T. Hunter :1940: A. G. Cole :1945: Hargreaves Parkinson :1949: Sir Gordon Newton :1972: Fredy Fisher :1981: Geoffrey Owen :1991: Richard Lambert :2001: Andrew Gowers :2005: Lionel Barber

Political allegiance

The Financial Times declared its support for Labour as early as the 1992 general election, when Neil Kinnock was attempting for the second time to return Labour to government for the first time since they had been ousted from power in 1979. In one of the surprise election results of the 20th century, John Major's Conservatives were elected for a fourth successive term; though their first under Major himself, as the previous three victories had been under Margaret Thatcher.

For the 2010 general election, however, the Financial Times supported the Conservatives on balance, despite criticising them. The party was re-elected after 13 years out of power. Failing to gain an overall majority they formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

References

External links

Official website

Category:Newspapers published in the United Kingdom Category:Business newspapers Category:Pearson PLC Category:Economy of the United Kingdom Category:International newspapers Category:Publications established in 1888 Category:1888 establishments in the United Kingdom *