The FT and mobile trends in media

The Financial Times and Muck Rack hosted Thursday a discussion on mobile trends in media.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, answered questions moderated by Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media.

Here is an excerpt from the FT’s report on the session:

Creating a digital culture and driving innovation internally were hot topics of discussion and Grimshaw had this to say: “The hardest challenge isn’t tech, but getting companies to adapt to a new way of thinking”.
The audience was keen to understand more about how the FT is trying to reach a younger demographic, to which Grimshaw replied “ Financial Times mobile readers are frequently in their late 20’s/early 30’s”.
This drove the discussion on regionalisation and Grimshaw talked about how the US leads the way in terms of FT content consumption on mobile and how it takes six months for the rest of the world to catch up.
In terms of future plans, social login, Flipboard and an API on FT.com were all mentioned by Grimshaw, as well as the need to collaborate more closely across the business to compete for readers’ attention in a crowded marketplace.

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.