usiness


for the print edition reflect the general downward trend, online the FT is a success story. This is premium information for which people are prepared to pay. And increasingly readers want access to that information on a variety of gadgets. Digital revenue now makes up 70 per cent of the FT’s total paying audience. The FT led the way with the “metered model” for payments,


whereby readers pay a fee for access to content after reading three free articles a month. Now the paper is moving to a new charging model with a fee for full access to FT content. At the end of February the FT announced it had print and digital circulation of 720,000 globally, of which two thirds were digital subscribers, up 21 per cent on the year. But, business-like, the FT cannot be complacent. Robert


Shrimsley, managing editor of ft.com (speaking to me before news of the Nikkei deal broke) said: “I’m pretty clear that nothing is forever online. I am at least as mindful of well-executed niche sites as I am of general business news ones. There is no single magic formula. All business models have their limitations, but at least with subscription models bankruptcy is less likely to be one of them.” It is a multimedia world. Ben Chu, deputy business editor


at The Independent, describes how his day might begin with picking up the early business news coverage from sister publication, the London Evening Standard, before starting to draw up the day’s story list. But there is also a chance that at some point in the day colleagues from London Live TV will ask a correspondent to go to the studios (in the same west London building) and give an update on a moving story. And then there is Twitter – “even faster than the wires as a source of material, just not always entirely reliable,” as Chu says. While the Indy will run five or six pages of business news,


stories may be claimed by the main news section . And then there is the i paper – edited from the Independent but selling (at 40 pence) six or seven times as many copies as its parent. It is online where the mix of competitors and new


voices is most intense and varied. Many operate without a paywall, hoping that the volume of readers will convince advertisers that the site is worth supporting. A busy website like Business Insider both feeds off news gathered elsewhere (“aggregation”…or is it “appropriation', as some critics call it,) while also putting up its own stories. The International Business Times ( disclosure:for which I write a fortnightly column) is a similar, fast-growing site.


A new website, CapX, supported by the Centre for Policy Studies, is producing high quality analysis and commentary. Quartz is another impressive website. Its tech reporter Leo Mirani says that it is not out to maximise traffic through sensational stories and it runs long reads as well as news. For journalists, this online era of “big data” is both


empowering but also potentially threatening. In a world of at times quite murky “search engine optimisation” techniques the temptation to write scandalous, inaccurate rubbish – “clickbait” – could be high. Individual reporters might be measured on the traffic they generate. This developing online world presents a test to editors, bosses and hacks alike. The ongoing battle of Reuters and Bloomberg to provide fast and dependable market coverage is at the heart of these changes. But there have been tensions and resignations at Reuters recently, as it struggles to balance its business selling terminals to market participants with journalism. Print is not dead yet, though. The FT’s new owners Nikkei are big believers. And Andrew Clark says: “Some readers still buy the paper for the share prices and unit trust prices, and they would probably protest pretty swiftly if we took them out.” There are still a few people, it seems, who look forward to their morning paper.


But what about the workers?


Yes, business is booming for business journalism. Yet something is missing. In that traditional but (these days) less frequently heard cry: what about the workers? Around 30 million


people go to work every day in the UK. We are told the economy is recovering. And business journalists keep us well informed as far as the share prices of quoted companies are concerned, their profitability (or lack of it),


the highly paid people who run these companies, the scandals and the screw-ups. But what is it like


to work for these businesses? This is much less well covered. And this is partly because the specialist correspondents who knew about work and workplaces – the labour, industrial and employment reporters – are so massively depleted. Unions have long


recognised that, unfortunately,


threatening strike action has been the most effective and sometimes the only way to get the attention of news editors. And yet, given the


continuing “productivity riddle” in our economy, the new minimum wage and in-work tax credits, and concerns over the future of the labour market, would it not be a good idea if the business pages also found space for reporting and analysis of what workers are doing? I only ask.


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