A note from our new Managing Director

It has been an exciting and productive start to my time at FT Strategies. I could have expected that when I joined a consultancy looking to emulate the very high standards of its 130-year-old owner – the Financial Times.

To introduce myself – I am Joanna Levesque and I am the new Managing Director of FT Strategies. Having spent my career working in both established and start-up consultancies, I am excited by the prospect of scaling an already thriving business. What struck me about FT Strategies is our origination story and our points of differentiation – it’s not often that a consultancy has deeply valuable lived experience and expertise in the same building, from the very outset.

Although it is still early days, I mentioned in my opening article that we believe in the importance of driving sustainable growth in news publishing across the wider media business and beyond. Specifically, we’ll be looking to:

• Be more than the sum of the parts – ramp up our combined experience with the rest of the FT to bring even more lived experience to our clients

• Be a confident exponent of that experience across the industry and more widely, helping clients to adapt their business models sustainably

• Maintain and deepen our relationship with our existing clients; providing cost-effective solutions into implementation

• Extend our sectors served more widely across media

• Expand our offering, enabling us to support a wider range of clients across a bigger range of problems

It’s a very exciting time to be taking over as Managing Director of FT Strategies – I cannot wait to meet as many of you as possible and continue the business’s remarkable story.

Joanna.

Joanna Levesque

Managing Director

FT Strategies

LAUNCH EVENT – Next Gen News report

Tuesday, 5 March | 9.00am (PST) / 12.00pm (EST) / 5.00pm (GMT)

We are delighted to announce our latest report, Next Gen News, which explores the behaviours and news preferences of 18 to 25-year-olds and the extent to which news producers meet their expectations and needs. Join us on Tuesday, 5 March for an exclusive report launch broadcast where we will host a panel of industry experts to discuss what makes young consumers different and how news producers can better serve their needs.

We’ll dive deeper into the key learnings from this research and explore how publishers can practically use the findings to improve their own efforts to reach younger readers. Secure your spot and be one of the first to receive a copy of the report.

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Recommended Reading

On Corporate Strategy:

• That’s where the media is right now: You can thrive being very small or very big, but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. (New York Times)
• Illegal subscription services that steal films or TV shows bring in $2 billion a year in ads and subscriber fees. How does OTT react? (Bloomberg)

On Revenue Growth:

• The Washington Post’s new CEO thinks the next opportunities are in social, AI, and personalization (Semafor)
• Bloomberg Media and Puck’s subscription strategy: ‘wake up the sleepers and prioritise the keepers’ (Journalism.co.uk)

On Operational Transformation:

• Five things news media can do to respond to consistent news avoidance (Reuters Institute)
• The New York Times rolls out new byline pages (NiemanLab)

On Data, AI & Tech Advisory:

• Which rights do AI and journalists have in common? (NiemanLab)
• Schibsted’s AI voices tells you the news (Schibsted)