It might not have the same campus cachet of Reading & Leeds or Boomtown or Parklife. but for discerning young festival-goers there is a new attraction on the summer calendar.
Taking place in the grounds of Kenwood House, a former stately home on London’s Hampstead Heath, it attracts more than 4,000 attendees for activities that range from analysis of foreign affairs and discussions on inheritance tax, to champagne tasting and eating Nepalese dumplings.
The 160-strong line-up at the Financial Times’s FT Weekend Festival includes Sir Ian McKellen, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Dragon’s Den star Deborah Meaden and Michael Palin. FT columnists such as Martin Wolf and Gillian Tett – rock stars for regular readers of the Pink ‘Un – will perform live.
That might not sound like conventional festival fare but this event has doubled in size over eight years and next Saturday’s edition will be the first to reach out to Generation Z. A new stage, FT Future, will host debates such as “Where Are the Young in Politics?” and “Are Young Men and Women Drifting Apart?”, the latter featuring numerical insights from the excellent FT chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch.
“This is a new stage that we have come up with to try and target the younger generation,” says Orson Francescone, MD of FT Live, the paper’s events division. “This is a broader, strategic aim of the FT as a whole – to tap into younger audiences.”
Such has been the upheaval in commercial media over the past 20 years that there is a real prospect that young people will be cut off from serious news. Publishers who have successfully transitioned to digital have, in most cases, introduced subscription paywalls which can be a red line to a young demographic that grew up thinking that online news is free.
And so increasingly they get their current affairs from social media, where their information diet is regulated by the algorithms of TikTok’s owner ByteDance, or X’s Elon Musk. Today’s students are “bombarded with low-quality content”, says the president of The Economist,Luke Bradley-Jones.
To address that problem, and underpin its own future business model, The Economist will on Tuesday make its daily news app, Espresso, available free of charge to 400 million students worldwide, aged 16 and up. The app, usually £79-a-year, includes AI-driven translation into multiple languages.
Publishers must plan ahead in nurturing news consumption habits and brand familiarisation. The fusty Telegraph made an early bet in putting its content on SnapChat, where it now has 1.9 million subscribers. The Daily Mail has 10 million followers on TikTok. The FT, despite being a pioneer of paywalls when launching digital subscriptions in 2002,began giving free copies of its paper to schools in 2017 and 100,000 students have used the service.
But live events can bring a different level of brand immersion. “It’s a wonderful day of content and fun,” says Francescone of the Kenwood House gathering, to which students have discount access. “The FT Weekend Festival is perfect to draw those (young) people in because our B2B conferences are for our professional audiences and it is important to curate the new subscribers of the future.”
The FT Future tent, one of 10 stages covering business, politics, technology and the arts, is billed as a spotlight on “the innovative ideas and voices of the brightest minds of the next generation”. It will host a news-based “pub quiz” and provide advice on “inter-generational money and career dilemmas”.
The festival will platform the TikToker (and Michelin-trained chef) Poppy O’Toole and 20-something AI trailblazer Aiden Gomez. It will also allow festival-goers to get up close as FT editor Roula Khalaf, in the company of Wolf and Tett, reveals the process of how the paper constructs its leading articles.
The FT Weekend Festival “is the incarnation of the print version of the weekend paper in its physical format,” says Francescone. That is more of a lifestyle-orientated product than the weekday editions and so is more attractive to a B2C consumer. There is an American arm of the festival, which takes place in Washington DC in May and has attracted speakers including Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
Events are big business for the FT, which is owned by Japanese media company Nikkei. FT Live runs 240 events a year, all around the world, and generates 30 per cent of FT Group profits. Most tickets are bought by people who watch remotely. Upwards of 5,000 are expected to view the FT Weekend Festival on a digital stream and those who attend have a 90-day Video-on-Demand pass to catch up on content they missed.
A surprising number may be young people who are learning the habit of paying for quality news.
