Dean Starkman of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed Financial Times editor Lionel Barber about the business newspaper’s digital-first strategy.
Here is an excerpt:
DS: Is the main sort of attraction of the print paper going to be longer, in-depth things that will be able to stay fresh for…
LB: Not necessarily, no. That’s one of the great intellectual and journalistic challenges which I’m relishing at the moment, is to reinvent, somewhat, the newspaper. That means actually you need to package information in the paper in an engaging way. And I would submit that, if you look at the FT, look at the use of graphics, particularly where we have hired a brilliant guy from the Guardian, Kevin Wilson, more than five years ago, who’s had a huge impact on the Financial Times. We have transformed how we tackle subjects. And, the Web has influenced how we use design and graphics to convey difficult themes. The next point is, we pride ourselves in the FT in writing very concisely, but with context.
We’re slightly less fussy. I respect American newspapers and American journalism enormously. You know I spent time at an American newspaper [as a visiting fellow at The Washington Post in the 1980s]. We’re snappy. We have attribution, but we allow a little bit more comment-stroke-judgments to be made in the news form. And I think we can do that because we’re trusted. So you can have really quite rich, informative 400-word articles. Then there’s the long form, yes. One of the most gratifying things that I’ve seen in the last year or so is that some of the most read articles in the Financial Times have been the long form.
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