In our recent webinar we spoke with Patrick Jenkins - Deputy Editor at the Financial Times, for a discussion on how his team are dealing with the lockdown and the business news agenda, and how you can best work with them.
Get the inside scoop below:
1. How has the FT responded to lockdown and how have you coped?In terms of the practicalities of putting a newspaper out, we have surprised ourselves with how smoothly we’ve been able to do this remotely. I don’t think there’s been a single day where we’ve actually put the paper out without anybody in the office, but I think we’ve done it with one person in the office, and we could’ve theoretically done it with nobody here.
All the systems have worked, all the communication channels that have been fringe services before, have become core means of communication now, as across so many businesses.
We’ve definitely learnt some lessons about some of the good things that we can do when we’re not all in an office, but we also equally are starting to value some of the things we’re missing, my colleague, Gillian Tett, is an anthropologist and she often talks about the risks of being siloed. I think that’s what you find when you rely on interacting through very formal, technological systems, is that you communicate very effectively with the people you need to communicate with in order to do a specific task, or prepare something, but you lose the cross-fertilisation that you get from just simply knocking around in an office and bumping into people and sharing ideas and so that creativity which is pretty essential in any media company is much harder to foster at the moment. So we’re going to have to find ways of recreating that I think.
2. How have you had to adapt things editorially? What does a day in the life of Patrick Jenkins look like now compared to three months ago?
Well it’s really interesting, I started as Deputy Editor in the middle of January and I probably had six weeks of semi-normality to get used to what the new job was going to be like before the Coronavirus story and related lockdown disruptions took over. So, it’s quite hard to compare, in very practical terms the way we run our day has shifted slightly.
In the old world we had a 9:30 a.m. news conference in our editorial conference room where we would’ve probably had on a typical day 20 people there. Everyone round the room, different news desks etc., pitching their stories. One thing that Roula Khalaf, our new editor, had initiated since taking over, was a less formal, one person speaks after another, and reads out their lists and so on and turned it into far more of a conversation, more constructive, more creative, less formally structured.
We’ve now moved to a 10 a.m. video conference and we’ve gone back to more structure, so you lose a bit of the interaction just for practical purposes, organising a video conference, you have to observe a bit of a formal structure because otherwise it just doesn’t work, people talking over each other and so on. We’ve gone back half an hour, as I say, to 10 a.m. instead of 9:30. It was originally done actually when quite a few of us were coming into the office, and it was so that people could avoid rush hour but it’s actually also helped with people’s domestic commitments during the morning and so on. So, that’s one of the big shifts. Interestingly, as a global news organisation, we’ve long had quite a lot of global coordination using video technology, so our New York news desk always dials into the afternoon news conference at 4 o’clock. The Hong Kong news desk always dial in to our 9:30 a.m. conference, so in that sense we have just expanded those communication principles to the UK network as well. But other than that, most things are operating as they would have done before, albeit through video channels rather than desk huddles.
3. Presumably you’re also seeing changes in the way that your readers are interacting with your content. Someone in our audience has mentioned that you have made your Coronavirus content free to access, has that had a big impact?We’ve seen quite a lot of changes in the way our readers interact with us. One pleasing thing, as a lot of news organisations have seen, is a substantial increase in reader numbers. That’s evident both on individual stories and in terms of our subscription numbers. Similar to 12 years ago with the financial crisis, something that’s disrupting the world in a big way and has some negative consequences for our business in terms of advertising revenue, is actually extremely good for our editorial engagement - the Coronavirus news itself, and particularly for us, the economic fallout.
We’ve had record levels of readers on Corona stories which surpassed previous records on Brexit related coverage, we’re above our all-time highs on Brexit related stories which our audience engagement team keep reminding us every day.
Some of that is because, as you say, some of our Coronavirus content was made free, we also took the view that we should make, two big pieces every day for you to read, regardless of the topic.
The other thing to maybe mention is people are reading at different times of day, that’s maybe predictable to some degree because people aren’t commuting the same way as they would’ve done before. We have a later peak in readership, 6 p.m. type time, and we have far more weekend readers than we ever had before. One of the things that was a big success is our Coronavirus blog which has stopped now, but it had been a seven-day a week, twenty-four house a day thing which we know was absorbing for people, given the numbers of readers it was attracting.
4. Presumably it has raised difficulties for your print edition?Absolutely, to some extent I suppose we have been protected by the fact that the vast majority of our print circulation is subscriber based, and I’m sure there has been some disruption there, but that’s largely gone on unaffected.
Where we’ve been hit is on two fronts, street vendor sales, the newspaper shops being closed hasn’t helped and then our bulk purchases that have traditionally gone to airlines, hotels. I think we’ve gone to something like 90% online readership now during this crisis, which has been the direction of travel of the FT for at least the last 10 years.
5. How do you think your approach to the business agenda is going to change with this crisis?I think the world is going to change, quite profoundly. To some extent it will snap back, but the level of indebtedness has gone through the roof and while it might be straightforward enough for most governments to sustain, at least for the time being, the consumer indebtedness is going to have a profound fall-out across the corporate world.
We haven’t yet seen this flow through into reality, there is a huge optimism in the stock markets that everything’s going to return in a v-shaped recovery, and while there may be some reasons to think that in Q3, and even more Q4, there will be a return to decent levels of revenue in many industries, that’s not going to be true across the board.
I think it does ignore your question, how is the world going to change? In other ways, in softer ways, that links back to something the FT made a big play of last year. We talked about a new agenda and a resetting of capitalism and I think that, both the questions thrown up by the Coronavirus and our response to it and inequality and the value attached to certain jobs, and the way in which the Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted similar themes as well as raising questions about tax, and the hard-nosed capitalism that has maybe dominated, even after the financial crisis.
I think that there will be a reassessment of this, and it kind of reaffirms some of the priorities that we were talking about institutionally, and the continued likely rise of focus on softening the hard edges, whether that be through ESG as a theme, or the climate agenda. All of these have kind of been put on hold by the emergency and the responses to it, but i think that they’ll probably be thrown into even more sharp relief by the events that are going to unfold over the twelve months.
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The Speaker
Patrick Jenkins is Deputy Editor of the Financial Times. Before his appointment, Patrick served as financial editor for over five years, shaping FT’s overall financial coverage and managing several teams, including banking, markets and Lex. Patrick joined the FT in 1998 and reported for FT Money and UK companies. He has been Frankfurt correspondent, Companies editor and Banking editor.