Andrew Littell, who in 2000 helped the Financial Times and MarketWatch.com start a business-news website, has died. He was 44.
Laurence Arnold of Bloomberg News writes, “In 2000, as head of corporate finance for the Financial Times Group Ltd., Littell helped create Financial Times MarketWatch.com Ltd., a joint venture with MarketWatch.com that established a real-time news and commentary website for European investors, FTMarketWatch.com.
“‘Andrew was a rising star with a bright future,’ Larry Kramer, publisher of USA Today in McLean, Virginia, said yesterday in an e-mail. Kramer founded U.S.-based MarketWatch in 1997 and was chairman of the joint venture with the Financial Times. ‘Andrew was instrumental in building new and creative advertising models, and we were very impressed with him.’
“Though it succeeded in building readership, FTMarketWatch.com couldn’t survive the drop in advertising when Internet stocks crashed in 2001 and 2002, Kramer said. The website was out of business by the time he sold MarketWatch to Dow Jones & Co. in 2005 for about $530 million.
