Financial Times battles misinformation and rising costs as readership drops

The number of people picking up a physical copy of the Financial Times has dropped amid the title battling rising costs – including hiring more journalists.

The broadsheet said its operating profit fell by £4.56m year on year, from £13.41m to £8.95m, in newly-filed accounts with Companies House.

The dip was “in part the result of inflationary pressures”, the FT said, adding that total staff costs increased by £15.2m in 2023, to £166.4m.

The paper hired 78 new employees during the year, it said, and implemented a cost-of-living payment for staff.

Revenue increased by £21m, from £422.5m to £443.9m, while profit for the year after tax was £3.32m, down from £3.19m in 2022.

The modern newspaper industry is a difficult one, with the FT listing “structural and cyclical changes” as well as inflationary pressures, global conflicts and “challenges posed by increase misinformation and disinformation” as key challenges for the business.

In line with the general decline of print readership, the FT reported that the number of readers paying for print fell by around seven per cent to 125,000 customers, or just under 10 per cent of the FT’s total readership. 

The company did, however, report an increase of 172,000 paying readers across all formats for the year, to £1.4m, with the increase driven by corporate digital subscriptions.

It said advertising “continued to outperform expectations” in 2023, reaching £151.6m, up from £149.7m in 2022, in an “extremely competitive marketplace”.

Events revenue grew by 11 per cent to £34.2m, from £30.8m, with “continued uptake on digital events as well as strong performance in the live space,” it said.

Earlier this year, the Financial Times inked a deal with OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, which will allow users of the AI chatbot to access summaries, quotes and links to FT articles.

OpenAI has reportedly been offering news organisations as much as $5m per year to license their copyrighted content to train its AI models.