THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW
THE
FIRST BIG INTERVIEW of John Ridding’ s career was with Barings Bank in Tokyo, and it went beautifully right up to the moment he looked down and saw that his voiceactivated recorder had decided, somewhere around the first question, that nobody in the room was talking. The banker was soft-spoken, the room was loud, and the machine had filed the whole conversation as silence. He somehow talked his way into a second pass. Barings, famously, never got one – destroyed in 1995 by a single trader in Singapore. That recorder is now the story John tells nervous journalists to settle them, which is how it came to be told across a table to Business Chief by John Ridding, CEO of the Financial Times for 19 years and now its Honorary Chairman.“ It was one of those stupid voice-activated recorders,” he says.“ It decided he wasn’ t talking. So it was just a nightmare.” Over the years that followed, American newspaper newsrooms lost 57 % of their people, 71,000 jobs shrinking to 31,000 between 2008 and 2020, according to Pew, and the British regional press went through something similar with less publicity. The FT, under a man who had never run anything bigger than a features desk, went the other way, to a global paying audience of 2.9 million, revenue of £ 540m( US $ 720m) and, by the time he left, the largest readership in its 137-year history.
And the monument to all this is a fish paste. Somewhere along the way, the London oyster bar where he held his lunchtime strategy sessions chalked“ Ridding smoked mackerel pâté” on the board, and he ranks it, without a flicker of irony, among his career highlights.“ It happened around the time I used to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm a lot, and Ted Danson had a pizza named after him, much to Larry David’ s chagrin,” he says.“ So I thought it was good timing.” He never liked oysters. He went for the pâté, the casual room and the fact that, in an industry falling down around him,“ it was quite nice to have a little sanctuary.” As for how a newspaperman earns a starter,“ you probably earn it like you earn most things, which is just commitment,” he tells Business Chief.“ And it was commitment to a course rather than a cause.”“ Reporting on business and running a business is two very different things,” John says,“ although I think most journalists think they can run a business.”
Robert De Niro explains the Japanese In July 2015 Nikkei paid Pearson £ 844m( US $ 1.3bn) for the FT, and a newsroom with a well-developed sense of what proprietors do to newspapers wanted to know what a Japanese one would do. John’ s reassurance came from the 2000 comedy Meet the Parents.
60 October 2026