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Financial Times
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The Financial Times (FT) is a British international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and is printed at 24 sites. Its primary rival is the New York City-based Wall Street Journal.
Founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and his brother, the Financial Times competed with four other finance-oriented newspapers, in 1945 absorbing the last, the Financial News (founded in 1884).
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Encyclopedia
The Financial Times (FT) is a British international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and is printed at 24 sites. Its primary rival is the New York City-based Wall Street Journal.
Founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and his brother, 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 business and financial news while maintaining an independent editorial outlook. It has attacked the financial policies of the British government. 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 by Horatio Bottomley, 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 as 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. In 1993, the FT printed a single edition on white to commemorate this change a hundred years earlier. 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.
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 23 locations with three international editions to serve the UK, continental Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
The European edition is distributed in continental Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. 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 changeds online. FT.com is one of the few UK news sites successfully operating on subscriptions.
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 March 2006, the FTs U.S. circulation was 137,845.
In September 1998, the FT became the first UK-based newspaper to sell more copies internationally than within the UK. Worldwide circulation stands at 432,548 (Source: ABC July 2006), with global readership estimated at over 1.6 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.
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.
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.
How to Spend It
How to Spend It is a monthly magazine usually published with the Financial Times Weekend Edition. 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.
Opinions
The Financial Times is politically centrist, in contrast to its right-leaning competitor, The Wall Street Journal. 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 also has been supportive of Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. FT editorials tend to be pro-European Union, though often critical. Noam Chomsky said it is "the only paper that tells the truth".
In the 2008 United States presidential election, the Financial Times endorsed Barack Obama.
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, October 1 1945. The origin of the name remains uncertain. It was conceived by Hargreaves Parkinson for the Financial News in the 1930s and took it to the Financial Times when the two merged.
FT Magazine
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.
Ownership and related products
FT Knowledge is an associated company, through Pearson PLC, 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.
Financial Times Group includes the Financial Times, FT.com, a 50% shareholding in The Economist, Interactive Data Corporation (a market data provider and the owner of eSignal), 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 in the UK of Investors Chronicle (a personal finance magazine), The Banker, Money Management and Financial Adviser (a publication targeted at professional advisers). The Financial Times Group has recently announced the acquisition of (an online news and commentary site for the industry) and (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 & Economic Times.
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.
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) & Shell were excluded. The oil and financial sectors being 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
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 newspapers 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. After 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: Gordon Newton
- 1972: Fredy Fisher
- 1981: Geoffrey Owen
- 1991: Richard Lambert
- 2001: Andrew Gowers
- 2005: Lionel Barber
External links
- — German language edition
- — Chinese language online edition
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