Nikkei chairman promises not to meddle with FT

The chairman of Nikkei, which closed on its purchase of the Financial Times on Monday, promised not to interfere in the operations of the business newspaper, write Guy Faulconbridge and Paul Sandle of Reuters.

Faulconbridge and Sandle write, “Ridding said the FT was ‘a little underweight’ in the United States and Asia, where he said Nikkei could help the paper.

“The FT has 750,000 subscribers, including 550,000 on digital platforms, but the newspaper was seeking to expand that total to the 1 million mark ‘as quickly as possible’, Ridding said. The Nikkei’s daily print circulation is 2.7 million and it has 430,000 digital subscriptions.

“Kita said the Japanese newspaper market, although still huge by Western standards at 40 million print copies a day, was falling each year by 1 million and declining readership among younger readers underscored the logic of the FT purchase.

“‘Together we will prove that great journalism can be a great business,’ Ridding said in a letter to FT staff seen by Reuters. ‘We will set the gold standard for news media business models as we do for quality journalism.’

“Ridding said the FT and its new owners were wedded to the principle of charging for premium content, but the mechanism could vary across markets and subscriber bases.”

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