Jon Allsop interviewed outgoing Financial Times CEO John Ridding about his tenure and the future of the financial newspaper.
Allsop writes, “Ridding had also become increasingly involved in strategy in his prior role, working on the Asian edition of the FT. Becoming CEO was a steep learning curve nonetheless. But he was soon making highly consequential decisions. The cover price of the print edition went up, which was controversial within the newsroom. (When he emailed the staff to let them know, one economics correspondent replied-to-all saying that he hoped Ridding knew what he was doing. Ridding was ‘fuming,’ and acted ‘a bit like Dr. Strangelove’ as he tried not to send a reply he would regret, he recalls, physically restraining his hand by way of demonstration.) Then, the FT’s website put up a metered paywall, which now seems totally normal but was, at the time, pioneering, and controversial within the wider industry. The move was designed to generate revenue from Web content, guided by the principle that it was worth as much as print journalism. It ended up yielding highly valuable data on readers, too.
“Around the same time, the financial crisis hit; it was broadly devastating for the media business, but the FT did okay, not least because people really needed the reliable financial information it offers. (‘The FT generally has a good crisis,’ Ridding says.) Other crises would follow, but before asking about those, I remember the Lunch format and ask how his broad beans are. (They’re ‘totally delicious,’ he says, though he seems to be hankering for a minced-lamb flatbread that Moro no longer serves. It was ‘possibly the best single dish in the whole world,’ he says. When it disappeared, ‘I had a conversation with the team, and they agreed for a while that they would continue to make it for me. And then I started to feel guilty because it was obviously a real pain in the arse.’) Niceties over, we move onto Brexit, which was not only a major economic shock, but also, I suggest, a philosophical one for the FT, as a bible of the international business elite. Ridding recalls going into the FT’s newsroom early the following morning—unusual for him, he says, since as a former FT journalist he’s ‘super sensitive to church and state’—and saw Lionel Barber, then the paper’s editor, sitting on a couch. ‘I thought, It’s really odd—we’re on the wrong side of history,’ Ridding remembers.”
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