Friday 24th November: How the Financial Times is broadening its portfolio

Good morning! Happy Friday and all that. This newsletter brought to you by Chris.

There’s just two weeks to go until Mx3 AI; a live event in London from Media Voices and Media Makers Meet. The full agenda is now live, so if you’ve been sitting on the fence, take a look at how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.

The Financial Times has been quietly diversifying its portfolio for some time now. It’s been fascinating to watch the development of FT Strategies and, occasionally, to hear directly from that team about how they’ve been evolving the pitch. But, as director of FT Strategies Lisa MacLeod told an audience at news:rewired last week, there’s plenty more in development at the financial title’s B2B wing.

Speaking about its News Sustainability Project, MacLeod said: ‘“The key finding is that news publishers need four revenue streams - besides their core income - each providing a minimum of 15 per cent of profit. After that it becomes messy because in effect you’re spreading yourself too thin”. News publishers do need to expand, but not beyond their capacity and skill level.’

There’s a lot more in there, especially from Orson Francescone, managing director of FT Live. One thing that’s especially interesting from the perspective of someone with a little media business is that even a media behemoth like the FT can find itself stretching itself too thin in service of growth.

This is a good thing! Of all the ridiculous, stupid, counterproductive changes Musk has made to Twitter, this certainly is one of them. But while it’s good that Twitter users can get context before clicking through to an article, and that publishers won’t need to find workarounds for posting, it’s just more evidence of the utter chaos that has Twitter circling the drain.

Right, here’s your daily dose of Skynet. The whole saga of Sam Altman’s sacking has continued apace, with new rumours of the why and the how bursting forth all the time. But this latest rumour, that the company has created an AI model that is simply too powerful, is gaining a lot of traction.

I remember not too long ago we were talking about the transition from climate change denialism to delayism. Effectively, now that the evidence of climate change is so overwhelmingly and so widely accepted, even the most rabid right-wing maniac can’t get away with putting denial in print. But as this study by DeSmog has found, The Telegraph is still trying its level best to downplay the scale of the problem.

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