Why is FT's Tilt behind a paywall?

Felix Salmon of Reuters critiques the new FT Tilt site, and he wonders why the Financial Times has put it behind a paywall.

Salmon writes, “Murphy is asking his overstretched journalists (just one person for all of Latin America, for instance) to tell financial professionals something they don’t already know: that’s a tall order.

“The big picture here, to me, is not that the FT is making an ambitious move into becoming a genuinely global financial-news organization, but rather that it isn’t. Important news about what’s going on in crucial global markets should be a core competency of the FT, a key part of why people read it rather than, say, the WSJ, which seems to be more interested in building up its New York City coverage. Instead, the big Tilt project is being ghettoized behind its own high paywall, is being forced to pay for itself through high-priced subscriptions, and is being deliberately withheld from the broader FT audience.

“I’ve said before that the FT is retreating to a newsletter model; I called that ‘a sad and narrow fate for what should be a proud and global newspaper.’ Tilt only reinforces that diagnosis, and seems to be based on the idea that the FT won’t invest in ambitious new projects which are central to what its target audience wants, unless it can wall those projects off and get them to pay for themselves on a narrow, self-standing basis.”

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