It’s like the ravens leaving the Tower of London: the London Stock Exchange has cancelled hundreds of corporate subscriptions to the Financial Times, the in-house organ of the Square Mile’s movers and shakers.
LSEG, the body which operates the exchange, is understood to have taken the decision in response to the paper’s gradual retreat from in-depth coverage of the London markets in favour of competing with more general news providers in the fields of politics and international reporting.
Since being founded as the London Financial Guide in 1888, coverage of the stock market has been the bread and butter of the Pink’un, from which the FTSE 100 index derives its name. But in recent years it has cut back its reporting on the capital’s listed businesses in favour of a wider focus on overseas markets as well as increased reporting on national and international politics, giving it a greater potential subscriber base. Rival City AM claim the FT’s coverage of large cap London-listed businesses has fallen by as much as 70 percent since 2010.
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“The quality of the political coverage at the FT has never been better and more pertinent… but its corporate coverage has never been weaker, particularly in London,” the communications chief of one FTSE 100 company was quoted as saying in City AM. “Senior editors increasingly seem more comfortable speaking at Davos than they do talking to the City.”
And a “long-serving former Financial Times journalist” was quoted as saying by its freesheet rival that: “A sustained retreat from daily coverage of global asset markets at the FT has left its core City readership having to look elsewhere, in print and online.”
But where though? Presumably not City AM, which alienated itself from much of the Square Mile in 2016 when, despite pretty much the entirety of its potential readership being against it, under editor Christian May it campaigned firmly in favour of Brexit.
May left in 2020 to make some money working for the likes of Teneo, Hawthorn Advisors and 5654 & Company, but returned to the City AM editor’s chair in 2024. Just last month he was penning an article headlined ‘The City has moved on from Brexit’, writing of how “those who warned of the Square Mile’s demise outside the European Union have been proven quite wrong” and “there is little enthusiasm in the City for putting financial services on the table as part of Starmer’s ‘reset’”.
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