Thursday, July 23, 2015

"Tyler Cowen on the 'Financial Times'"

Lifted in toto from Economic Policy Journal:
He [Tyler Cowen] writes:
 The *Financial Times* as a purely digital product
The word is now in, Nikkei is the buyer, but Pearson is keeping The Economist.I find the Financial Times works well as a purely digital product, and of the major newspapers it is the one I can most easily imagine reading digital only.  From a newspaper I care not only about the amount of absolute content, but also the sense that I haven’t “missed anything.”  Often I find this feeling of completeness hard to get from digital editions, even when they are fairly well done.  There is too much content, with too many overlapping categories, to organize everything neatly.  There is a new set of stories up before I am sure I really have culled through the old.  The FT runs fewer stories, has fewer sections and content areas, and the wonderful Saturday edition has a relatively transparent structure which I can navigate on-line. 
Would it be so terrible for other newspapers to concentrate their arts and leisure coverage, or their book reviews, on one or two days of the week?  Digitalization might eventually bring that about, for greater ease of navigation.  In the digital world, “less content” seems less miserly, because a universe of alternative content is at your fingertips in any case....{MORE}
My attitude toward FT is fairly similar, If I want the top global financial news, the stuff that is really important, rather than less important stories or, worse, click bait, I go to FT rather than WSJ, Market Watch, Bloomberg, Reuters or anything else, I head to FT.

My go to news spot for the Greek crisis was FT. 

Saying that a media outlet provides serious reporting can drive people away rather than toward the outlet, but in FT's case, it is serious reporting  and a great read.

If I had to choose only one financial source it would be online FT.

I hope the new owners don't muck it up.
Not much to add.