• Issue 3
• Politics and Society

On 23 April, the Pearson group launched a campaign to revitalise their flagship newspaper, the Financial Times. Driven by the campaign website, the ad blitz also extends to huge billboards dotted around London and a few changes to the UK's print edition. 

Unfortunately, visitors to the website are greeted with the sounds of screaming gulls, ambulances and helicopters that all but drown out the waves lapping against the island's shores.

The island itself is nice - a financial Utopia, it includes some of the world's most iconic modern buildings. The concept is simple.  Click on any building and news from its real geographical region appears.

But like most things that seem to be true, this is, too.  Continental Europe, with its shortage of slick ultramodern financial buildings is represented only twice (Paris' Arche de la Defence and Frankfurt's Kommerzbank Tower). The US has five buildings, Asia six.  Australia, Latin America and Africa lack any representation at all.

Yet with spring fading into summer - and summer holidays - why launch a new campaign now?  Quite simply, the FT isn't shifting enough copies. Being one of the world's most influential publications doesn't always tranlsate into high sales figures.

Britons, it seems, just don't appreciate a pink financial newspaper that has plenty of international news but little gossip or sport. The FT sells 130,000 copies a day domestically (compared to freesheet thelondonpaper's 436,000); and worldwide, sales rise to just 400,000. Its biggest competitor, the Wall Street Journal, sells more than four million copies in the US alone.

But why?  Rumor has it that the FT is too progressive to please the conservative white collars in major financial markets.  Too conservative to appeal to the workers of the world, the FT now seeks to placate market-watchers worldwide in a bid to convince them that it's not so liberal after all. Fortunately, the newspaper's stance doesn't actually seem to have changed significantly.  Take the articles of Sheila McNulty on BP's safety culture, or lack thereof (available only to subscribers).

And yet ironically BP's CEO, Lord Browne, stepped down not as a result of those articles, but the tabloid ones exposing his private life.  What the FT couldn't achieve, the Mail on Sunday could - or, more damningly, what 15 workers' deaths couldn't do, a sex affair did.

This isn't the first time around for Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino to be bailing out the FT, though.  The woman who famously said the paper would be sold 'over my dead body' got the FT back into the black three years ago without selling a single extra copy.  Instead, she turned the paper's magazine into 'an advertising gold mine', made staff operations more efficient and restocked its website with a new horde of multimedia journalists.

Let's just hope she can do it again.  After all, the world doesn't need a more conservative FT - just a more modern one.

Image: JJ O'Donoghue