The Financial Times they are a' Changing

Was at a session yesterday for Tech bloggers to meet the Financial Times online team. Two of the other bloggers there have covered it very well already - Patrick Smith at The Wire, and Joanna Geary's live twts at the time (start here and work backwards).

For me there were two very interesting bits of the afternoon - the discussion around the future business models and where the value can be retained by a publisher like the FT, and talking about Alphaville, the online "chatty" bit of the FT offering.

The discussion around value retention was really a discussion around sustainable value add - the view that was emerging yesterday was that - in essence - filtering and adding trysted, believable analysis to a time starved audience was the source of real value. Given that this audience was itself high value, that was the future "sweet spot". I sketched this 2x2 at the time:



(Its a sketch, I want to add nuance to it as I reflect on it, but I think there is something profound - albeit unpalatable to the geek crowd - about it)

The Alphaville offering has fascinated me since it came out, I looked at it for another piece of work we did early this year. As Patrick notes, it has a different feel to the FT proper:

But perhaps the most popular element of Alphaville is the Markets Live blog- an occasional liveblog on market movements that blends real-time share movements, analyst notes, general business news and reader comments.

It’s all written in an irreverent, cheeky but informative manner by Alphaville editor Paul Murphy and senior markets reporter Neil Hume that has proved a hit with readers (you can read old transcripts online).

The blog has its own set of emoticons, such as little tin hats representing dramatic falls in the value of companies that were frequently used last Monday, the worst day of trading since 2001.

It also functions as a livestream of market gossip - you can be plugged into The City without being in The City. As value based lifestreaming goes, that pretty high. But the most interesting thing to me was their note about the rise in popularity of their 12am Lunch Wrap aggregation of the key stories, and its "one minute manageable content" impact. Filtering & Adding Value in action.....

Update - Andy Piper of IBM puts his thoughts down here... he notes an interesting point I' forgotten re Yammer, the TC50 winner:

several of us opined that a solution like Yammer was “never going to work” for internal communications, and the FT team currently exchange a lot of email and use Skype rather than having an internal social software platform.

Yes, that was interesting, as was the FT's experience (as in a few big corps we've worked with) that Skype had taken over the IM role.