I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay for another news source on top of NYT, WP, The Economist, The Atlantic and The New Yorker but in these crazy times I often find the FT publishes stories first and I find the analysis excellent . In particular I look for pieces by Gideon Rachman (excellent podcast too), Ed Luce and John Burn Murdoch . It was Murdoch data analysis on the Covid pandemic that first got me looking at the FT as a primary source on issues beyond economics and business . Some suggestions to the FT though: 1) sort out the marketing and content of your premium offering , I might try it but I’m not convinced at the moment. 2) use real voices for some articles , much much better than AI generated audio . 3) make it easier to search for articles and to look back at articles read history

The layout on my iPhone, iPad, and iPad mini is excellent. The only complaint is that I often come across gated links to FT articles on Twitter and the web but there is no way to automatically open the story in the app and access with my subscription. The New York Times has this feature for its app. With the FT, it’s necessary to open the app and attempt to locate the article manually. Otherwise, a superb app and newspaper.

This app and the FT site doesn’t allow paid subscribers who need to use these articles as sources for academic or scholarly research to save full text articles to organizers like Pocket or Evernote. As such the FT subscription is worthless. Other major news publications allow subscribers to save full text articles for future reference and use as source materials. A serious scholar or researcher needs to be able to keep full text articles from various publications on specialized topics in one folder or location. The way things ate at present, a subscriber has to log on to the FT app or website, then go to a different site, location or folder to compare or supplement the information in the FT article with that of articles from other publications like The Economist or Bloomberg. This is a huge nuisance indeed. New regulations are needed to stop FT from engaging in this monopolistic practice.

FT has great quality contributors and , generally, well curated reports. It’s also, generally, up to date on what’s happening. BUT, it’s biased, strongly, towards a ( aged) “ western liberal democracy “ which is clearly in decline, and is morally bankrupt ( the near silence on Gaza and the vilification of Xi speaks loudly about that). FT is also relatively ignorant on how ahead of the west China is, on the roots of the Ukrainian conflict and on the emerging Eurasian world order. Good contributions on rectifying these would help. Finally: a particularly irritating feature is “ premium” content. The price tag of a subscription for FT is already high enough for this cheap trick. Please drop it. I’m a university professor in Brazil who can barely keep with the regular, what to say about premium. Good customers vs. a bit more profits is a trade off to think about.