FT's Vertical Tool for Sifting Through the News

Occasionally, among all the media disaster stories, there is some good news about a standout company that is defeating the odds by achieving sustained growth, producing excellent work, and innovating technologically.

Like the Financial Times. Long many a business journalist’s favorite reads, the FT on its distinctive salmon-colored newsprint continues to be a disruptive force in media, setting an example others could follow, yet few do.

Late last week, for example, as Soraya Kishtwari reported, FT beta-launched of a new vertical search engine called Newssift, which is meant to help business professionals go deep in a topic: “Rather than scouring the entire web, the tool will give users access to relevant databases, as well as filtering articles from a wide array of international business news outlets, including professional sites, opinion pages and blogs.”

Newssift uses an array of tagging tools and semantic algorithms to locate and provide a context for its results,as opposed to key word searches. For now, the service will be offered for free, though that is subject to review, and Newssift will rely on ads for monetization purposes.

Reasons I’ve cited in the past for the comparative success of London-based FT include its relentless focus on global business coverage, whilst maintaining high-quality editorial standards. It is worth noting, therefore that some close readers of the paper have detected a slight “dumbing down” of the content lately, including sensationalistic headlines aimed presumably at its growing U.S. audience, according to this somewhat snobbish British perspective.

Management at the FT has also acted prudently to implement a shortened work week policy during the current economic crisis as opposed to outright job cuts. Meanwhile, in my view, one area where the company needs serious improvement is the load time for its (now salmon-colored) website. It remains unacceptably slow in an age when financial markets move at lightning speed. Despite FT’s reputation for being innovative on the tech side, maintaining such an overly-heavy homepage represents a throwback to the days of shovelware.