THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW
Okay isn’ t good enough if you could be doing something better somewhere else
John Ridding Honorary Chairman Financial Times
you want to be corrected,” he says.“ At the same time it also wants engagement, so it won’ t leave you alone to think about the questions.” Of the AI giants themselves, he is critical.“ Precisely because AI makes a lot of mistakes and isn’ t particularly trusted, the trust factor of the FT has become even more important. Our subscriber numbers continue to set records pretty much month after month.”
Sixteen years for a wave John plays trombone in the R & B band he formed in his early teens, which still gigs with him as, by his own ranking, its least accomplished member, and only because a school short of a trombonist told him his hands were too small for the piano.“ I think secretly they wanted a trombonist,” he says. He never learned to read music, so he spent his orchestral years picking up the gist and leaning on the first trombonist.“ Quite often in journalism you’ re in a situation where you have to wing it.” Patience he learned elsewhere. Runner, surfer, Leeds United supporter, and it is the football that taught him patience.“ It was 16 years out of the big time,” he says of the club’ s exile from the Premier League, which ended in 2020.“ I never had to wait 16 years to catch a wave.” Surfing taught him selection and humility:“ the sea will always humiliate you at some point”, and the discipline of reading the water instead of paddling for everything.“ It’ s knowing where you fit in and how you seize the right opportunities.” The last question is where the FT fits in a world of tariffs, borders and war, and it is the one he answers fastest. Trusted, accurate information, he says, in an ecosystem being corroded by deepfakes and polarisation, produced by an institution whose DNA is internationalist and whose people have lived in Seoul and Hong Kong and Paris, as he has. Theresa May’ s 2016 verdict that a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere still needles him.“ That really jarred with me, and I suspect many people in the FT,” he says.“ We do see ourselves as citizens of the world, and have a connection with and responsibility to that world, to help build connections across borders.”
66 October 2026