Financial Times is an international business newspaper based in London.
The FT was founded in 1888 and has been owned since 1957 by the British publishing conglomerate Pearson, which also owns a 50 percent stake in the British foreign-affairs magazine The Economist. In late 2012, a change in Pearson’s CEO led to suspicions that the FT might be sold, though Pearson executives denied those reports.
The FT had a worldwide circulation of about 677,000 as of 2014, about half in print and half online, with the majority of subscribers outside of the United Kingdom. The United States, with about 137,000 subscribers, has a higher Times circulation than Britain. The FT also had 455,000 paid digital and mobile subscribers as of 2014, with about half of those subscriptions bought by companies for their employees. (It had 290,000 corporate subscribers in total.) Its digital subscriptions surpassed its print subscriptions in mid-2012, and its digital revenue accounted for 46% of its overall revenue in early 2014 — the highest percentage of any U.K. newspaper. Of that digital revenue, about 60% came from digital subscriptions. In 2013, the paper announced it would cut down to a single global print edition as part of a shift toward digital-only publication.
The FT covers international business and financial news and is targeted toward high-ranking business officials around the world, and has launched a Latin American website and mobile app. In 2013, its subscribers included more than 160,000 users who accessed the paper through business licenses. It has been considered one of the world’s best newspapers.
The paper’s holding company, the Financial Times Group, has been profitable throughout the late 2000s, though its revenues have been buoyed in part by the success of the Economist. The paper had 550 newsroom employees as of 2014.
The FT announced in 2014 that it would opt out of the U.K.’s new Independent Press Standards Organisation and instead create an independent ombudsman-like position called an editorial complaints commissioner.
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