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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
CEO Jon Slade on how FT became a hit with Gen Z | Top 50 global news websites ranking
Plus B2B travel news boss Daniel Pearce of TTG says “finding our purpose” was business turning point in our latest ‘What I’ve Learned’ interview
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👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Thursday, 17 September.
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😜 Persuading under-35s to take a break from Youtube and visit an actual publisher website or app is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry.
Doing nothing and hoping they grow up into responsible news consumers is one strategy.
Making increased engagement with under-35s a strategic priority for the business, creating a cross-discipline working group and investing in a range of initiatives, is another way of looking at the problem.
It turns out the latter has been working rather well for the Financial Times which, according to Ipsos iris data, is the UK national newspaper brand with the highest proportion of younger readers.
He also shed new light on how the FT manages its AI content licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, the extent to which the FT is under attack from AI bots (1.2 million page access requests from one bot pretending to be a real reader in the space of eight hours), and what he has learned about how to persuade staff to “rally to the cause of change”.
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He led a management buyout of the business in 2013 and has seen it grow and prosper ever since (with the exception of the pandemic years when the travel industry collapsed).
Like Press Gazette, TTG bounced back from the pandemic with renewed focused on face-to-face events, which after the awful Zoom years remain bigger than ever.
In addition to the big ticket Travel Industry Awards launched in 2021, TTG just launched a smaller event focused on connecting buyers and sellers called Black Book which curates 121 meetings between 150 travel advisors and 100 sponsors.
His inspiration is Winston Churchill (me too!) and his work mantra?
“Done is better than perfect. In a fast-moving independent media business, with limited resources, you have to commit to being brilliant without spending too long on everything you do.”
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