⭐️Your December update: End Of Year Review

This year, FT Strategies turned five years old. Now, five years doesn’t sound like a lot (especially compared to the FT’s 130+ year history), but our business has transformed compared to when we first set out:

• We have worked with over 800 media organisations and media owners from around the world (including EL PAÍS, the Guardian, Corriere della Sera, Nation Media Group, Singapore Press Holdings, and the National Theatre) in over 70 countries.
• We have helped our clients to achieve remarkable outcomes to fulfil our mission to secure the future of quality news and publishing. As an example, we have helped EL PAÍS to grow from 120,000 to 350,000 digital subscribers and worked with GNI Subscription Lab participants to acquire hundreds of thousands of new subscribers.
• We have supported clients with a wide range of services - launching AI experiments (including developing propensity to churn models, LLM chatbots, newsroom transformations and first-party data), with fantastic results such as increasing conversion rates of marketing campaigns (by 10x) and growing known visitors to a site by 58%.
• We have extended our partnership with the Google News Initiative to provide additional support to 1,000 news organisations across the world by 2027.
• We have developed a strong body of original research - including Next Gen News, Revenue Diversification in Media and the News Sustainability Project. 
• In the meantime as a team, we have grown to more than 60 people, who are passionate about the future of news and wider publishing.

Although these are achievements that we are very proud of, we don’t want to stop there. We want to be the go-to consultancy for news, publishing and information producers - whether it is corporate strategy, commercial growth, operational transformation or AI, technology & data. To do that, we want to deliver even more valuable work and evidence the value we create for our clients. Expect much more of that next year.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our 2024 highlights below and we look forward to supporting your growth in 2025. Wishing you all a successful end to the year and a restful break.

2024 Highlights

Develop and execute a corporate strategy

This year, we saw higher demand for corporate strategy and M&A-related work. That’s no surprise given high-profile transactions (such as The Telegraph and The Observer) and higher deal flow within the news and publishing market compared to 2023. Learn more about Corporate Strategy.

Grow your audience, revenue and profitability

This year, we doubled down on our Commercial Growth consulting pillar. We were delighted to see our contribution towards EL PAÍS reaching over 350,000 digital subscribers today, compared to the 120,000 they had when we first started working together in 2021. In case you missed it, we also launched Next Gen News - a research piece which aims to help businesses better engage and monetise younger audiences. Learn more about Commercial Growth.

Transform the way you work and are organised

In the face of structural market challenges and business reorgs, we have helped our clients plot the path to profitability. We helped them redesign the workflows within their newsroom, reduce the cost of their print operation and rethink their content strategy to meet user needs. Learn more about Operational Transformation.

Build the data, AI and tech to drive innovation and growth

We have made big strides towards helping news and publishing organisations to design and build their own AI applications. This included building AI Chatbots, article summaries, automated reporting on earthquakes, text-to-speech for audio experiences and deploying user needs content analysis. If you haven’t already, sign up to our AI newsletter - Learning Machines - written by our AI Lead, Sam Gould. Learn more about AI, Technology & Data.

News in the Digital Age: Key Themes

This year, we hosted our second annual alumni summit, News In The Digital Age in partnership with the Google News Initiative. It was a privilege to welcome over 300 news organisations from around the globe for a day dedicated to knowledge exchange and community building. So many interesting topics were covered but there were four that stood out from the crowd: 

• Understanding the drivers of financial sustainability in news publishing
• What are news media really doing with AI? 
• Serving the news audiences of 2030 and beyond with innovative products
• Diversifying revenue for long-term success

Read the recap >>