Financial Times Society, Media & Technology summit. Interview with the summit chair, editorial consultant and former FT associate editor John Willman.

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Doha, Qatar was the host city for a May Financial Times summit entitled Society, Media & Technology 2009. The summit’s subtitle was ‘Competition and collaboration in the post-crisis economy,’ and boasted speakers such as Lebanese Minister of Information HE Dr Tarek Mitri, Al-Jazeera director general Wadah Khanfar, and Neil Cook, managing director of the Gulf Times newspaper.

RIA Novosti caught up with the summit chair, editorial consultant and former FT associate editor John Willman, to find out his views on the future of the media and discover the secret of The Financial Times’ success.


What is the importance of this summit?

The importance of this summit is that the media, the whole industry around the media that contributes technology and telecommunications, has become very interesting for the people of this region, because it is a growing industry. It has a lot of opportunities in this region and globally, which has been demonstrated by Al-Jazeera, and they want to let them grow, because like most of this part of the world they want to look at future ways of earning money after oil is no longer earning money for them. People always think of the media as a small thing on the side, but actually it is a very big industry globally, it employs a lot of people nowadays, and earns a lot of money.

You worked for The Financial Times for quite some time. What would you say to those who believe that print media is dead and the future belongs to Internet?

Well, I am sure you know the old story about Mark Twain. He went to China and it was reported back in America that he was dead, killed in an accident. And when he heard about that he said to a reporter: “the report of my death has been much exaggerated”. The same is true of the newspaper industry. It is certainly in decline structurally in the longer term. But we’ve seen in the last two years on this that despite first the credit crunch, then the financial crisis and now the economic crisis, good newspapers around the world have been selling more copies, because they provide the sort of analysis and fact-base that even television can’t really provide. In fact the Internet is not so good in providing as well, because a newspaper can collect things together in a very useful way for you. The most important things you read in a newspaper are not the things you looked for, but the things you read you did not expect to find there - this would be some point of view you had not thought of, which a newspaper can put in front of you.

There are many newspapers nowadays, big brands, with huge budgets. But when you see a person reading The Financial Times, even people who do not read newspapers suspect that that person is fairly intelligent. How do you create an image like that and how do you keep it that way? What is your secret?

Exactly, it its all brand and it started in a very strange way. It is an English newspaper that started in London and mainly reported on stock-markets at first, and then gradually realized that its business readers wanted to know what was going on in the rest of the world.If they wanted to know about the oil industry or energy prices in the Middle East, you would need to know about places where oil is brought out of the soil.

And a series of very visionary editors realized first of all that they had to move from being what was just a trade paper to being a general newspaper, and then they realized a little later actually that they had created something quite unique in The Financial Times. There was nothing like that elsewhere, certainly not in Europe. So, we launched then a European edition, and that was very successful, it grew very quickly.

When I joined The Financial Times twenty years ago three quarters of our sales were still in the United Kingdom and a quarter in Europe. It began building in the rest of the world very quickly and then  we launched an American edition and that American edition was very successful too. Now, America is a country that does have a business newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, a very big newspaper, which at that time had two million sales a day.

Our own sales that time were three hundred thousand. It was a David and Goliath thing. And people would say how you are going to beat The Wall Street Journal? To which the answer was: we are not going to beat them. They have dominance in domestic business reporting which would take us years to catch up with.

But what we brought is a different perspective, we wrote more about international affairs, and we found there was quite a good reach up in the America and it built up in the next ten years. We now sell more copies in the United States than in the United Kingdom. It is about a three way split: UK, Europe and the Americas, and, actually, a 10% share which is growing in Asia. So, it was a succession of developments that we have gone through, from being a local newspaper in the city of London to being one of the really global newspapers in the world. And there are not many…

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