FT EIC Khalaf: Good journalism will bring more readers

Financial Times editor in chief Roula Khalaf spoke with Der Spiegel about the newspaper’s strategy and its goals.

Here is an excerpt:

DER SPIEGEL: Despite its efforts, the FT is still considered as a newspaper for men. How has the number of female readers developed?

Khalaf: The majority of our readers are still male and over 50, but the trend is in the right direction. What we have also seen, though, is that as our overall subscriber base has grown, the percentage of those that are women has remained relatively consistent. And the average proportion of women subscribers reading our stories has gone up by 4 percent since our focused efforts to deepen the engagement of women subscribers began.

DER SPIEGEL: Of its 1.1 million subscribers, 960,000 read the FT online. Has the pandemic accelerated the end of the printed edition?

Khalaf: In the beginning, we actually wondered what would become of the printed edition. We had delivery problems, we couldn’t get the paper to our readers. But print has proved surprisingly resilient. The circulation of the printed weekend edition has even increased.

DER SPIEGEL: Where would you like to see the FT’s circulation to be in five years?

Khalaf: The company has to issue the target. We are not looking so much at the number growing quickly, but at subscribers staying with us and not leaving after three months. With discounts, you can quickly gain millions of readers. Our goal is to achieve that with good journalism.

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