FT and Economist hired Cambridge Analytica to get U.S. readers

the-economist-logo The Economist and the Financial Times hired controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica to help them get more subscribers in the United States, reports Mark Di Stefano of Buzzfeed.

Di Stefano writes, “Both the Economist and the Financial Times were Cambridge Analytica clients, with an industry source saying the data firm had been brought on board as way to gain new US subscribers.

“A spokesperson for the Economist told BuzzFeed News Cambridge Analytica was enlisted ‘to help us understand the size of the market in the US.’

“‘They shared their estimate of our market size and we then concluded the project,’ the spokesperson said. ‘We’ve not worked with them since.’

“The magazine said it didn’t know whether Cambridge Analytica had deployed the Facebook data during the project.

“The spokesperson said: ‘No, we don’t know. They certainly made no mention of using Facebook data.’

“At the FT, editors and reporters have been asking about what Cambridge Analytica did for them, with suspicions raised after the newspaper included a single-line disclosure in some of its recent reporting about the firm.”

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.