Having a copy of the Financial Times poking out of your valise is one way of telling the world that you are a sophisticated business type. Another way is to show people the new FT mobile service on your BlackBerry.

Here’s the news from the press release:

The Financial Times today announces the launch of a new FT.com website optimised for mobile devices available at m.ft.com. The site is consistent with the new FT.com design unveiled in November 2008 and follows the news that FT.com has broken the one million registered user barrier for the first time.

The idea is to loop a younger generation into the FT, particularly young people who think that any newspaper showing up on any part of their person is like driving a chariot to work in the morning rush hour.

More from the release:

Phase one of the launch offers a new touch screen interface, faster access to content, improved search, the ability to customise and follow stock options and, although the site works on any phone, optimisation for the iPhone and BlackBerry which together account for over 60 per cent of FT.com mobile traffic.

And:

Phase two of the launch in the first quarter will include interactive mobile charting so users can quickly access company information and index data on the go. A dedicated iPhone application will follow, incorporating more sophisticated graphics and charts and the ability to quickly share FT content with the integration of the address book.

And now you know How to Spend It.

It’s layoff week at Gannett — even the second N and T might be redundant.

The largest U.S. newspaper publisher and owner of USA Today, the nation’s biggest-selling daily paper, is slashing payroll just in time for the holidays. We read about layoffs everywhere these days, but if you want to see the slow-motion car crash version of how Gannett is doing it, look to Gannett Blog, run by former company reporter Jim Hopkins.

With no newspaper job to keep him busy, Hopkins chronicles nearly every event that he hears about Gannett. That includes a dose of rumor, but much of what he reports is more right than wrong.

Here is one of his latest reports:

Gannett launched what is likely the biggest mass layoff in newspaper industry history yesterday, slashing 655 jobs by early this morning, in an increasingly desperate bid to return the troubled 102-year-old publisher to prosperity. The final tally could run into the thousands.

Many more layoffs are expected today and tomorrow across the 85-daily community newspaper division, plus USA Today and the Detroit Free Press. As of 1:25 a.m. ET, only 17 papers had been accounted for, based on published accounts and Gannett Blog reader reports.

(My Gannett newsroom sources are telling me the same story.)

And while we knew that Gannett was going to cut deeply, he is keeping score at more than 80 papers, thanks to a legion of newsroom sources that dwarfs that of nearly every other reporter who covers the business.

A sample from Wednesday morning, all from anonymous posters:

The Tennessean has started layoffs today (Tuesday), a day earlier than they had told us. So far in the newsroom today we’ve lost two managers and a copy editor.

Fort Myers in progress; so far two copy editors and a designer.

Pensacola News Journal has finished up. At least five has been laid off, including the business editor who was called in from her maternity leave. Classy.

See the layoff ticker, which Hopkins updates often. Also check the documents that he posted on his website that purport to show Gannett papers’ double-digit profit margins as the company wields the axe.

UPDATE: Even Scotland is not immune,

Gannett is hardly the only publisher hacking away at payroll. Conde Nast, Time Inc and the Associated Press all are up to the same thing. The Financial Times, which not long ago was touting how good the financial crisis was for the paper, is offering buyouts and shorter work weeks. It also is freezing salaries for folks who make more than $50,000 a year.

Keep an eye on:

Yahoo: How does former AOL boss Jonathan Miller fit into the picture? Rupert Murdoch’s New York papers offer completely different stories, allowing you to believe one while scoffing at the other. The Wall Street Journal says Miller is trying to raise as much as $30 billion to buy Yahoo. The New York Post says Miller is trying to raise money for Velocity Interactive Group, the investment fund that he runs with former Fox Interactive Media chief Ross Levinsohn. We’ll only briefly remark on how funny it is that an investment firm is trying to raise money from investors.

Google: The party is officially over, according to The Wall Street Journal. Side projects involving grand visions for absent-minded professors appear to be “out.” Making money appears to be “in.” (The Wall Street Journal)

MySpace: Rupert Murdoch’s online social network is letting members use their mobile phones and devices to watch videos posted to their MySpace homepages. That does NOT include the Apple iPhone — yet. (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

It’s not every day that we can work in obscure Nick Lowe album titles into our blog headlines, so it’s particularly gratifying when pop music trivia finds a golden opportunity for use after sitting around in our heads for years.

The news today is that the Financial Times, perhaps the world’s most famous pink paper, is overhauling its website starting Tuesday. It says new features will appear over the next six months.

Here is the top of the press release, and below you can see a shot of what the page will look like:

The Financial Times today announced that the roll out of a redesign of FT.com will begin on Tuesday November 11 with the addition of five new-look homepages, including a Middle East edition page. This follows the successful launch last week of FT Alphaville’s Long Room and record traffic on FT.com driven by an increased demand for accurate, independent and authoritative news and analysis on global businesses and politics.

The reaction among folks in the blogosphere seems fairly positive. Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carlson had this to say about the disappearing distinctions in the 21st century between old and new media:

With its vertical flow of articles (what Web designers call “the river”), huge pictures, and headlines, the new Financial Times is a blog — with perhaps a slightly larger overhead.

PaidContent.org’s UK site ran an interview with FT.com Editor James Montgomery, which had this interesting excerpt:

There is also a conscious move away from calling the site “FT.com”: now the front page will be clearly labeled ‘Financial Times’. That’s designed to tell traditional readers - the FT is one of the few print newspapers in the UK whose circulation is growing - that the website has the same content they like and more. Though Montgomery is keen to stress that FT.com is “a very handy URL, and we won’t be giving that up.”

(Photo: Courtesy of Financial Times)

Business news analysis service Breakingviews.com isn’t doing too shabbily since getting the boot from its longtime space in The Wall Street Journal. Not long after that happened, it wound up in The New York Times and its sister paper the International Herald Tribune, as well as the Daily Telegraph. (And occasionally it shows up in the Journal through the miracle of advertising.)

Now it’s scoping out Time Warner territory. Breakingviews plans to announce on Thursday that it has strucka deal to appear in Fortune magazine starting Oct. 27, while selected “views” will run on the Internet at CNNMoney.com, which includes Fortune’s online material. In addition, Breakvingviews staffers will join the CNNMoney video line-up in the near future.

Breakingviews, which jostles with The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street and Financial Times’s Lex column to analyze business news for investors and other market types, has 27 columnists based in London, New York, Paris, Washington, Madrid and San Francisco, according to the press release.

The contract lasts for one year.

(Photo: Reuters)

It looks like The Guardian was the first to report that the Financial Times would cut up to 60 jobs in its editorial library and managing editor’s office, as well as its advertising sales, finance, IT, conferences and marketing departments. The Guardian might have overplayed things a bit, as we hear no one has decided on final numbers and that plenty of cuts could come through leaving some jobs unfilled and various other humane means.

If the FT shed 60 non-newsroom employees, that would amount to a little under 4 percent of its total staff (1,600 positions, with about 550 in editorial). As FT chief John Ridding says in the memo, it’s streamlining, not fallout from the financial crisis. In that respect, as Ridding has told us, world economic pain has been good to the FT so far. Still, it probably won’t hurt to batten down the hatches before the advertising market starts taking on water.

Here’s the memo:

Dear All,

As I have said in our staff presentations and business updates we are continuously looking to streamline our organisation, to make it as efficient as possible and to adapt it to the rapidly changing media industry.

This has involved creating a global management structure, integrating print and online, and bringing our acquisitions more closely into the FT.

We are now assessing further steps in this process, including the creation of a single magazine production operation, increasing the integration of our personal finance operations, further integrating our advertising sales teams, and transferring a number of financial functions to our operation in Manila. As a result, about 60 existing positions may be affected. We will obviously try to manage this as carefully and sensitively as possible, and we will now be launching a period of consultation about the proposed changes. Anyone who might be affected will be contacted by their manager today.

As you will have seen from the recent Pearson trading statement (attached), we are continuing to perform well despite the challenging market conditions. Our circulation is strong, a tribute to the exceptional coverage by our editorial team, while the efforts and expertise of our commercial team continues to drive revenues. Sustained success, however, means we must continue to adapt to market and audience demands and to look for efficiencies. The measures we are considering are designed to achieve that.

I’ll keep you informed about progress.

All the best

John

Some interesting points from a weekend opinion piece by Financial Times Editor Lionel Barber.
Barber analyzed how the press — particularly in the United States — got to the miserable place that it’s in now. There are plenty of reasons having to do with business models and impatient Wall Street vultures, but Barber brought up an interesting idea: the mainstream media disenfranchised itself from the public’s trust as it became more cozy with its high-level sources — precisely at the time that the Internet started to annihilate the U.S. newspaper business model.

Barber relies on Michael Elliott, the British-born editor of Time’s international edition, to sum up the U.S. newspaper crisis:

A broken business model overly reliant on classified advertising revenue that has now moved online; a mistaken notion that post-1945 newspaper staffs of 800-plus journalists were the norm rather than a historical aberration; and, crucially, a stultifying failure to innovate because of the lack of competition.

(This last part, when applied to newsrooms, amounts to blaming the victim, Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi suggests in an American Journalism Review article out recently.)

Elliott suggests that the U.S. press could be more fun.

“The mainstream press in America is so conservative,” Elliott says. “Where are the DVD giveaways, where are the special promotions like in Britain? Look at the sports pages! They write about sport like they do City Hall. Where is the sense of fun?”

Barber himself strikes a serious note more typical of the FT’s own writing style when he cites media writer Eric Alterman’s view that bloggers often rely on readership to fact-check posted material, whereas newspapers try to get that out of the way before publishing:

As an editor myself, I find this prospect alarming - not so much because it threatens to put me (and many colleagues) out of a job but because it signals a departure from an honourable tradition in which professional journalists do their best - through a process of discovery relying on multiple sources - to establish something approaching a rough historical record.

Would a DVD giveaway would help?

(Photo: Reuters newsroom, quite a long time ago.)

When the markets go south and most people are losing, it’s safe to say that there are some others who are winning, or at least spotting opportunities. You could say that about the Financial Times and its chief executive, John Ridding, who is finding a business angle on what they say about the editor’s decision-making process: “If it bleeds, it leads.”The London-based FT is building up a pretty good head of steam, particularly in the United States, as the effects of the financial crisis ooze into yet more corners of Wall Street and Main Street (sick of the “streets” cliche yet?). Here’s evidence, some of which Ridding gave me when we had breakfast at Michael’s last week:

• Newsstand sales rose 30 percent in the United States in September, and about 20 percent in Europe and Asia. That’s compared to August 2008, i.e., it’s a “sequential” gain rather than year-over-year growth. In the United Kingdom, Ridding said, “We basically couldn’t print enough copies and retailers were running out.”
• The number of registered users of FT.com rose to 750,000 now, compared with 30,000 a year ago. Some of this growth of course, came from pulling back the curtain last November. But Ridding said a couple hundred thousand of those showed up in the past few months, as the mortgage and housing crisis in the United States deepened and then metastasized into full-blown world-market-crisis mode. (Here’s how registration and subscription works at FT.com)
• During one week, Ridding noted, page views hit 25 million, more than double the normal amount. Ridding’s conclusion: “What [the crisis] is doing for our readership and audience is pretty remarkable. I think it really underlines this idea that at a time of turmoil, people really do need trusted guides, and are prepared to pay.” (The Journal, if anyone’s wondering, logged 21.7 million visitors at its website, up 110 percent from last year. It’s hard to tell whether the figure is comparable.)
• During the week of Sept. 22, online page views were up 300 percent, and monthly unique visitors were up 250 percent compared with last year. The United States is pitching in so far, producing the largest number of unique users.

That’s all very good, but reader interest tends to spike during news events, and ebb afterward. Ridding suggested ways to retain the newcomers:Stick to paid subscriptions. Ridding noted that many readers have stuck with the paper through its newsstand sale price increases, and plenty of folks are willing to pay for not only the FT, but access to the Lex column too.

• Do more video. People apparently like it as it’s resulting in more than a million views a month, Ridding said.
• Get the paper on more formats. Press hard for online subscriptions as much as print ones. Get it on the Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. Use RSS and other tools — whatever it takes to get it out there.
• Push online use as much as print. Ridding was proud to say that the FT’s dependence on print advertising has fallen to 42 percent, an important point to keep in mind as print newspaper advertising dries up. And don’t get worried about the idea that online use will “cannibalize” print sales, Ridding said. “The idea of online cannibalizing print is not just wrong, it’s the opposite. It’s proving to be a very effective marketing tool for the newspaper.”

None of this should indicate that the FT has figured out something that the rest of the world has missed, he noted. “No one has necessarily nailed the business model in media, but we feel that we’ve got a pretty strong vision and operation.”

(Photo: Reuters)

For better or worse, Rupert Murdoch has made big changes to the look and feel of The Wall Street Journal. But whatever your take, it’s hard to dislike a man who loves newspapers so much, says Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Financial Times owner Pearson.

“He’s made a lot of changes,” Scardino told journalists on the day Pearson reported forecast-beating results, choosing her words carefully, but adding that the idea that editorial independence would be preserved at the Journal “didn’t last very long.”

Scardino said she didn’t envy the Journal its circulation of 2 million, about four times that of the FT, saying the FT was a “niche newspaper” with a lower cost base. She did, however, praise the journal’s managing editor, Robert Thomson, who just happens to be a former editor of the FT’s U.S. edition. Her verdict on Murdoch? “He loves newspapers. It’s hard to dislike a man for that.”  

You can read a 2007 interview with Murdoch by WSJ journalists on the subject of editorial independence here.

NBCU is not for sale. Got that?GE Chairman Jeff Immelt plans to put to bed persistent rumors that the industrial conglomerate is considering courting buyers for its broadcast, cable and movies division after the Beijing Olympics, according to the New York Times, citing Immelt’s note to GE investors in its annual report that will be filed on Wednesday.NYT quotes from the letter:“Should we sell NBCU? The answer is no!”"I just don’t see it happening. Not before the Olympics, not after the Olympics. It doesn’t make sense.”Immelt tells investors NBCU earnings are also expected to jump 10 percent this year.Speculation gathered steam last October after the Financial Times reported about Immelt considering NBCU’s fate only after the Olympics in August, citing unnamed sources. That set the chatter mill abuzz with scenario-spinning with potential suitors for pieces, if not the whole.But who really wants a broadcast network — and who doesn’t already have one — these days?(NYTimes)Keep an eye on:

• Hulu launches, finally. (Reuters)
• Spitzer, from all angles. (HuffPost)
• Disney sees $1 billion from online content revenue in 2008, up from $700 million in 2007. (paidContent)
• AOL replaces head of Platform A after just seven months. (NYPost)

(Photo: Reuters)