Financial Times Maintains Loyalty Among Global Business Readers

For more than 108 years Financial Times is one of the leading Financial newspapers globally; we examine the papers path through Time and the most important features of the paper.

The Financial Times is a British newspaper that is issued in London England as well as in twenty more sites around the world. The most important competitor of the Financial Times newspaper is the US-based Wall Street Journal newspaper.

The paper started small, serving mainly City traders, also having a local rival, Financial News. As years went by the paper evolved, grew and increased its depth and width of coverage. The paper developed a network of correspondents around the world that reflected in their stories the move towards a global economy from the early days. The paper attributes very much of the quality and coverage on this network of correspondents that still holds very well until the present days.

The newspaper is usually divided into two parts: the first part covers national and international news, and the second part covers company and market news.

Financial Times offers content that contributes significantly their main newspaper; the most important is:

• The Financial Times magazine; it is distributed in the weekend edition and parts of the magazine are included in the US printed edition of the newspaper

• How to spend it; posh advice on how rich people can spend their wealth

• Opinions; supports global markets and the world economy in general. Through Opinions, the paper supported Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and Barrack Obama

• The Lex column; covers business and financial news on a daily basis.

• FT Knowledge is an associated company which offers educational products and services. FT Knowledge has offered the "Introducing the City" course (which is a series of Wednesday night lectures/seminars, as well as weekend events) during the Autumn and Spring since 2000

• FT Predict is a prediction market contest the Financial Times is hosting that allows users to buy and sell contracts based on future financial, political, and news-driven events by spending fictional Financial Times Dollars (FT$). Based on the assumptions displayed in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, this contest allows people to use prediction markets to observe future occurrences while competing for weekly and monthly prizes

• The Financial Times also ran a business related game called "In the Pink" (a phrase meaning "in good health", also a reference to the colour of the newspaper and to the phrase "in the red" meaning to be making a loss). The player is put in the virtual role of Chief Executive and the goal is to have the highest profit when the game closes. The winner of the game (the player who makes the highest profit) will receive a real monetary prize of £10,000. The game ran from 1 May to 28 June 2006.

In 1995, Financial Times made it online, starting a Website. The site started with providing a high summary of worldwide news; the paper added stock prices in 1996. The second version of the site was launched in 1997. Gradually the site grew in content and services. Currently it is one of the few subscription-based newspaper sites (Wall Street Journal also supports this Business model). It is also possible to purchase online a printed Financial Times subscription. The users who visit FT.com are 3 million every month from the US alone. They are mostly single men with no kids, some college education and an average income of $30,000 - $50,000.