The Financial Times Digital Success Only Highlights Print's Difficulties

This September, the New Yorker ran a good piece called "The Financial Times and the Future of Journalism". Using the Financial Times as an example of a successful print news model, the article details the trials and tribulations facing print newspapers in the digital age. Digital disruption has made breaking news, the kind one would read about in the early news edition a thing of the past. All breaking news hits the internet and social media first. Exclusive news is a rare commodity for print publishers.

Also, a majority of print publishers are struggling mightily in their attempts to monetize their digital business. The New York Times has a much publicized metered paywall business model which grants readers access to 10 articles a month before a paywall is hit and the reader is forced to either purchase a subscription or wait a month for another 10 free articles. The Financial Times, an important publication for bankers an financial professionals (essentially a niche product) has recently abandoned their metered paywall system in favor of a very inexpensive subscription model (only 1$ for one-month of access). Here's some background on the publication's reasoning for the change:

“The real challenge for news media and for journalism in the digital age is it’s fragmenting all the time, and people don’t come to one place. In the old days, people would have a newspaper, maybe two. And then, the usual transition, they would go to the home page. But that’s all blown up and fragmented. People are finding F.T. stories and other stories on all sorts of platforms, and different channels. Our approach was to think: ‘How do you recreate that habit, that engagement, of the old print world in the digital world?’ And by definition, if you have a metered model, which limits people to eight articles a month—or ten, or three—your model is actually getting in the way of habit. People aren’t going to form a habit if you are rationing what they read.”

This change in business models has gotten the attention of foreign investors who are now buying in to the Financial Times.

This is a smart way to approach digital business models, however, it only highlights the difficulties other broad newspapers face. As a niche product, the Financial Times is more likely to become the single news source for readers interested in this topic. Broad news outlets and local outlets still face trouble via digital disruption, either from an influx of free to access content on the web or via the digital divide in which the traditional print audience may not have access to the internet or digital technology to read an online newspaper.

This also highlights the difficulty publishers have in choosing what business model works best. There is no right or way to run the digital business. What works for one publication may not work for another, no matter how similar the editorial may be.