IN RECENT years a variety of global names in journalism have been put forward as potential buyers of the Financial Times. But it came as a surprise when, on July 23rd, the FT’s owner, Pearson, announced that it was selling the newspaper to Nikkei of Japan, for £844m ($1.3 billion). Pearson wants to concentrate on its education businesses, and its boss, John Fallon, argued that with the growth of mobile and social-media platforms, a better home for the FT would be a global, digital news company.
However, it is not clear quite how Nikkei fits the bill. It publishes Japan’s largest business newspaper, the Nikkei. But it is almost entirely focused on the domestic market. Its daily has 2.7m paid subscribers to the FT’s 720,000, but only one-sixth of them receive the paper digitally. The FT is much further along in the transition from print, with two-thirds of subscribers having gone digital.
Nikkei has promised to respect the FT’s editorial independence, even though its own journalistic culture is far removed from that of the British paper. It is a willing participant...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1DShmR8
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