Secrets of Financial Times success

 Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Want to know the secret sauce of the FT’s industry-leading crossover percentage? In February, it offered these numbers: 286,000 print subscribers and 316,000 digital subscribers — the first newspaper to see digital surpass print. Of those 316,000 digital subs, though, 163,780 — or 51 percent of them — are subscriptions bought by companies for their employees. These are business-to-business sales, rather than business-to-consumer sales. Those are the fruit of another ahead-of-the-pack move by the FT. Under Caspar de Bono, FT Direct Licensing has built an first-of-its-kind direct business. Rather than leaving B2B customer sales relationships to aggregators like Lexis Nexis and News Corp.’s Factiva, the FT began converting corporate FT buyers to direct relationships in 2008. It sold those 163,000 digital subs through 2,787 separate annual licenses, up 40 percent from 2011. It also sells an additional 13,000 newspapers a day under these contracts for people who still like the feel of old-fashioned print. In addition, the FT has now extending its direct license business beyond companies to the education industry.
... The FT is working with Flipboard to allow FT subscribers to read its content in that app, following The New York Times’ similar integration. “You paid for it — you decide how you want to read it,” says Grimshaw, noting the “reader is the king in this now.” The job of the FT and publishers generally: “Do the plumbing.” As with the price/cost question of digital subscriptions, it’s becoming blindingly clear that readers don’t care about the mechanics of how they get their stuff, movies, music, TV or news — they just want it to be where they are, when they’re there...

Data assets drive the business

The data team has about 30 people, organized into three groups: Data Analytics & Campaigns, Data Product Development, and Data Technology. It’s a team that’s grown from about a dozen when the FT first started transforming its old-fashioned research group into a digital-forward team, and began hiring analysts from non-media consumer marketing backgrounds. This is the group that has moved to the center of how FT managers make decisions. It’s not seat-of-the-pants intuition; it’s about ideas tested and the data that results that leads to new ideas about how to snare customers. How many of these capabilities do you find inside your news company:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/the-newsonomics-of-a-news-company-of-the-future/