Categories: OLD Media Moves

Financial Times makes more stories available online

Stephen Brook of The Guardian writes Monday that The Financial Times has changed its online access to allow readers to view up to 30 stories per month for free.

Brook wrote, “The new model has been tested overseas and will launch worldwide mid-October. The current system – where only non-business news stories and analysis is free and business news become subscription-only after 24 hours – will be abandoned.

“Replacing it will be free access for all for the first five articles, with a ‘light-touch registration’ required after that and a total of 30 free articles each month. ‘The fundamental change here is to say to the user — you choose,’ says John Ridding, the FT’s chief executive.

“Project Mockingbird – the code name for the new access model – is part of a raft of changes to the site that include a redesign, a new markets page, more bloggers and more video. The company is implementing changes at a time, it says, when the website is riding high. Unique users and page views to FT.com are up more than 70% and 50% respectively so far this year.”

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.