How the Financial Times keeps up editorial experimentation

By Lucinda Southern

All publications are under the gun, and the first things to get cut are usually experimental. To help guard against that, the FT last year brought on a “special projects” editor, Robin Kwong, charged with leading temporary experiments that don’t always lead to a permanent product.

These experiments include everything from posting original content native to Facebook to live streaming video in 360 degrees. As the experiments operate in an ad hoc fashion, Kwong often works with different teams on a temporary basis. The role sits somewhere in the middle of an effective editor and a commercially minded product manager.

“Most reporters — especially the organized ones — will have a column of broken dreams, ideas they want to do but they don’t fit anywhere and they don’t have anyone to help with it,” Kwong said. After feeling frustrated that there was no one leading the charge on these irregular projects, Kwong, a former interactive journalist at the FT, moved into the role to give more structure to these experiments.

“There’s always the core of an idea of something we want to achieve, but translating that into the end product and discussing who else needs to be involved, that’s where I come in,” he said.

Some special projects are tied in with the newsroom’s priorities. One experiment was to live stream in 360-degree video the moment when Nigel Farage, head of the campaign for the U.K. to leave the EU, found out the results of the referendum.

robin-kwong
Robin Kwong

“In terms of outcomes, it was an abject failure,” said Kwong. “In terms of experiments, is was a resounding success.” After five seconds of low resolution and choppy images — thanks to sluggish Wi-Fi — they killed the stream. However, the FT was satisfied because it now has a detailed 12-point checklist it can use for any future 360-degree live streams. Some were simply small operational points, like an additional person is needed to field the YouTube comments, so turn them off if resource is low.

Other projects do become more permanent: The FT has started creating online hubs for article series and special projects like Robot Week (a series on features on robots) and a series on human trafficking. Insight gained from these led to the product team making improvements to topic pages on the new FT.com, which launched in October.

“Regardless of how readers arrived (through social, search, or direct), they then tend to want to just go from one interesting article to the next, rather than going to the landing page in between to hunt for the next piece they want to read,” he said. “A key design lesson here is that we need to put a lot of effort into thinking about how we guide people to the next story from the article page.”

Going forward, the FT plans to create more visual stories. But most of its reporters haven’t had to write storyboards. Inevitably this has forced a change in culture, process and workflow: Reporters have to do more pre-reporting and working with photographers even in the planning stages.

This piece, for example, follows a barrel of oil from the Syrian oil fields. For five weeks, the reporters worked with the FT’s cartography expert to figure out what would be needed to create all the maps and data tables in the piece. The article was written three days before publication. Previously, the process would have been reversed, with reporters spending weeks writing the text and leaving the graphics desk a couple of days to get get the images in order.

Kwong’s ultimate aim is to no longer be needed by putting enough tools and processes in place for editors and reporters to pitch and run their own special projects. He’s created, for example, pitching forms for the reporter, a checklist for the editor and a list of questions to ask of Lantern, FT’s in-house analytics dashboard.

It has already starting to pay off. Kwong had no direct involvement on this piece about how China’s exports dominate the world’s oceans, but it came together thanks to systems he had put in place.

china
The FT wants to create more visual stories.

“Something can start off as a special project, but once we’ve done it several times, you create the resources and tools,” he said. “It’s not sustainable for the FT to rely on one special projects editor.”

Why The Financial Times’ newsletters aren’t for everyone

By Lucia Moses

The Financial Times is unusual among news publishers for its reliance on subscriber revenue; it makes more than half of its money this way. The FT’s email newsletters are particularly aimed at retaining and upselling its subscribers, who can pay a rich $249 a year for standard digital and up to $612 a year for premium print plus digital.

“There was always a sense of bringing in new readers,” said Andrew Jack, head of curated content at the FT. “But premium is a real area of focus. We’ve redoubled around premium to get people to upgrade.” To that end, the FT is launching a new newsletter for premium subscribers on Monday. Called Authers’ Note, it’ll feature a daily briefing by senior investment commentator John Authers on Wall Street after the closing bell.

Jack leads a staff of five devoted full-time to newsletters; editorial staffers at various news desks handle much of the daily newsletter writing. Eight other newsletters, including Best of Lex, Brexit Briefing and Opening Quote, are available only to standard or premium subscribers. Another nine are available to non-paying but registered users.

The FT clearly feels it’s doing something right with newsletters, since it’s launched 12 in the past two years alone, including Brexit Briefing, fintechFT and White House Countdown this year. It claims more than 750,000 total opens a week across its eight subscriber-only newsletters (which could include the same person opening one more than once).

Each newsletter is growing by a single digit percentage per month in net new signups (after accounting for people who unsubscribe). Their total open rates range from 25 percent to 50 percent (38.5 percent is the open rate for media and publishing newsletters as measured by email marketing company MailChimp).

Increasingly, publishers are putting out newsletters that are designed to be a product unto themselves and read entirely in email. Similarly with the FT’s premium newsletters, they tend to have a lot of original content, and because their recipients are already subscribing, the FT doesn’t need them to click back to the site. It’s the opposite with the free newsletters, which have less original content and are designed for people to click through to the site, where they’ll likely hit the FT’s high paywall.

It’s hard to tell if newsletters are actually getting people to subscribe because there are so many triggers that get people to subscribe, though. However, if they click to subscribe directly from the email, the newsletter can take all the credit. (Jack wouldn’t say how much, though.)

And while getting signups is good, the FT also ultimately wants its newsletters to pay for themselves. That’s hard for publishers to do because there’s no third-party auditor of newsletters.

Jack said the newsletters get “significant” revenue from standard and sponsorship ads, but acknowledged the measurement issues and expectations that the newsletters pay their own way. “Clearly, the long-term objective is that newsletters are part of an editorial package that should be generating income.”

This article originally appeared on Digiday.

Why the Financial Times still believes in comment sections

Why the Financial Times still believes in comment sections

In times of belt-tightening, the Financial Times is making more data-informed decisions around audience development. For this reason, it is improving its approach to comments and commenters on site.

With a lot of conversation having migrated to social media, it’s not uncommon for some publishers — like The Telegraph, for example — to ax its comments section entirely. But the FT believes its readers are paying to be part of this community and to take part in the debate.

Up until recently, the strategy around comments was more about damage control. Last year, Renée Kaplan joined as head of audience engagement and has built up an 11-person team. Now that team is getting more proactive and is using comments as a tool for engagement. “For other media companies, the comment strategy is more about growth,” said Kaplan. “For the FT, we have a unique commitment to make something of these comments, the readers are entitled to being part of the quality conversation and what the community has to offer.”

Currently, FT readers can comment on news stories, analysis and opinion pieces, where the highest volume of comments is. The FT routinely disables comments on more explosive news stories, though — Russian politics, climate change, Islamic extremists — because no productive discourse took place here.

That said, here’s how its strategy is shaping up.

Putting a commercial value on the commenter.
Only subscribers can post comments; therefore, the FT already knows a lot about them. Not enough, though. Leading the research into understanding the commercial value of commenters is community manager Lilah Raptopoulos.

“We want to know whether they are, as we suspect, our most engaged users,” said Raptopoulos. “We need to understand what the commercial correlation is, what effect does a comment have on our subscribers, will commenters share more, or visit the site more often?” Anecdotally, the team has hunches about these hypotheses, but for now, this is a work in progress.

Extending the audience.
Comments have been also a springboard to bring in new, younger audiences, crucial for a heritage brand like the FT wanting to stay relevant.

The comments on a recent story called “Why millennials go on holiday instead of saving for a pension” were overwhelmingly left by older readers and showed a real lack of understanding about young people. So Raptopoulos jumped in calling out for younger voices, and cross-promoted the call-out on social media too.

Shout out to all those financially-minded millennials
Shout out to all those financially-minded millennials

As a result, the FT received around 15 more comments from younger people. Kaplan thinks it’s unlikely they would have been subscribers; instead, they took the time to sign up to the one-month trial subscription which costs £1 for one month in order to comment. This led to its own piece on the most interesting comments, leading to another 150 comments.

Getting journalists to care.
In a shrinking newsroom, getting reporters to care about comments is a challenge, making it all the more important to have this data-informed research on the value of a commenter.

“Newsrooms tend to hate comments,” admitted Kaplan. “They’re a pain. There are trolls. People feel abused.” Kaplan’s team developed best practices, based on the minority of journalists who are already engaging with commenters. Tips included tricks for turning around a negative tone and for leading the conversation offline.

Shaping article ideas.
The FT is not typically a publication that goes in for crowdsourcing article ideas, but there are occasions where the personal experience of its readers is proving to be particularly enriching, triggering leads and story ideas.

Rather than hoping for the best from comments, the FT is playing with different formats in the space under articles and seeing which ones work the best for feedback. This private call-out box was placed underneath a news story about how Brexit would impact U.K. expats living in Europe. People could anonymously give feedback on their own experience knowing that their responses would help the journalism. It also went out in newsletters to subscribers interested in Brexit, and under other relevant stories. In 48 hours, the FT received 350 responses from U.K. expats in 45 stories, on their experiences, which are being used to shape an interactive piece for the site.

Comment callouts to shape future pieces
Comment callouts to shape future pieces

Trolls are subscribers too.
Just because the FT has a paywall, that doesn’t shield it from trolls. Like other publications, it will delete posts that are defamatory, personal attacks or outright false. Users have three strikes before they are shut down. Comments are moderated practically 24 hours a day, and if something is deleted or a warning is sent, Raptopoulos is in there saying why and linking to the guidelines.

But these people are paying for the privilege to engage in debate, so it’s a double-edged sword. “Outright banning is never the right approach,” said Kaplan. “We’re not here to censor.”

“We see the value of comments as fundamentally good,” adds Raptopoulos. “We’re more interested in encouraging better conversation than just chastising the bad.”

This article originally appeared on Digiday.

Digital subscribers surpass print at Financial Times

FT, insights, and native advertising

I remember during the Internet bubble, the financial media would look to bellweather stocks, like Cisco, to represent how the stock market was moving.

The Financial Times (along with its stateside brother-from-another-mother, the Wall Street Journal) is a bellweather of financial media.

So, when the venerable FT reaches an inflection point where its digital subscribers surpasses those from print, I think it’s fair to extrapolate that out that — hey, we’re really there…

According to Paid Content:

“Work will shift from night to day, when people are actually online reading. “[The] 1970s-style newspaper publishing process — making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night — is dead,” Barber wrote. “In future, our print product will derive from the web offering — not vice versa.” Journalists will “publish stories to meet peak viewing times on the web rather than old print deadlines.”

Though it may have taken longer for finance to embrace digital (from a media consumption point of view), when the FT has 100k more digital subs than print, it’s time to say we’ve arrived.

Extending this out further in the financial ecosystem

So, couple of thoughts about the move to digital.

  • I was early to the Finance 2.0 movement. Many of the next-generation finance companies I covered in my book are still around but they haven’t quite trampled the incumbent players. Are we reaching a point where we’re going to see more mass adoption of these tools like Motif Investing, Wealthfront, and Covestor?
  • Curation becomes as important as original content: Seeking Alpha has it right. In a digital age of investing, print is so late to the game. Curation becomes paramount as news moves faster and the trading-side of the investment game moves faster.
  • Do financial content and investing get closer to one another? Investment platforms understand that content is what brings new investors in the door (see the job Mick Weinstein is doing at Covestor), but I’m not convinced it makes them stay. Are we going to see that change?

What do you think of the news? Let me know in the comments.

BTW, if you’re interested in getting serious about publishing a finance book, check this out.