WSJ and FT looking to future news models
Jinfo Blog

3rd May 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Along with capital, intelligence remains the lifeblood of any business, and both are undergoing spasms at the moment. Britain’s MPs have recently commented on the contrast between the banks’ assurances that they are lending more and businesses’ perception that loans are still hard to come by (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19230) – and not too long ago the Pew Research Institute reported (http://digbig.com/4yrcq) that United States newspaper advertising revenues had fallen by nearly a quarter in the past two years and that nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 was now gone. Yet the Wall Street Journal’s current boast is that it is the only major US newspaper to grow its circulation – by nearly 3% according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures (http://digbig.com/4yrcr - also reported by Penny Crossland at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19165) – and Pearson has reported good growth in the Financial Times Group’s content, subscription and digital revenues, despite a weakening in advertising in the first quarter (http://digbig.com/4yrcs). Dow Jones’s Paul Bascobert points to continued investment in products, delivery platforms and news coverage as underlying the WSJ’s success – but the key factor has to be, as he puts it, an ‘engaged audience for advertisers’. So too with the FT. Its blogs have seen a fourfold increase in page views and unique users over the past 12 months, and their readers have been making over 18,000 comments per month – so it has now announced (http://digbig.com/4yrct) the launch of yet more blogs, ‘to continue to give readers opportunities... to share their own expertise with the broader FT community’ as managing editor Robert Shrimsley put it. Going still further, the FT has now also announced that it is inviting readers to help shape the paper’s hallowed leader columns (http://digbig.com/4yrcw). Entering what was previously the preserve of only the most senior writers, FT readers will now be able to contribute to a debate whose results will be summarised in a subsequent editorial. OK, so it’s not exactly the free-for-all that one associates with reader postings to many general and specialist news media – but encouraging the growth of communities of this kind is the likely model for the survival of news for the foreseeable future. In a recent lecture at Queen Mary College, London (http://digbig.com/4yrcx) Guardian newspaper editor Alan Rusbridger called on the media to combine the whistleblowing potential of bloggers with the scepticism of the professional reporter doing the detailed investigation. Both the FT and Guardian models cast journalists in the role of evaluators of the mass of unverified news and comment now in the public domain. In the individual business that they serve, information professionals need to be doing the same thing.

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