Categories: OLD Media Moves

Financial Times faces weak ad market

Mark Sweney of The Guradian reports that Pearson Plc, the parent of the Financial Times, is saying that the business newspaper is facing a weak advertising market.

Sweney writes, “Pearson has said that the Financial Times faced a ‘weak’ advertising market in the first quarter of this year, but nevertheless managed to increase its digital subscriptions by 4% on the first quarter to 328,000, while Penguin has had a good start with strong sellers from authors including Jamie Oliver and Nora Roberts.

“Overall, Pearson said total group revenues fell 1% year on year on an underlying basis to £1.2bn in the first quarter.

“Pearson, which owns an international education business and book publisher Penguin, said the FT has been hit by the fact that a number of large advertising campaigns have been planned for the second quarter compared with last year, when they ran in the first three months.

“The company, which is proposing a final dividend of 30p at its annual general meeting to be held on Friday, said that despite the weak trading conditions, the FT was ‘benefiting from resilient demand for content and services.’ The FT has a global paid and digital circulation of 602,000.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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