Yesterday, an executive from Financial Times parent Pearson (NYSE: PSO) told us the news publisher was preparing to start “sunsetting” its printed newspaper, in favour of solely digital distribution, within five years.
Today, Pearson distanced itself from Madi Solomon’s remarks, saying they were incorrect.
“We’ve got no plans to scale back the print operations. We’ve got 23 print sites, we are opening new ones – we opened Abu Dhabi this year and are hopeful of being able to commence printing in India some time soon,” a spokesperson told paidContent:UK.
“The print readership is actually growing for the FT. We’re gaining on all the big reader surveys – more people are reading the FT in print than ever before. Our print revenues are showing good growth.” The spokesperson said Pearson sees print and digital as “complementary, not substitutional.”
“It’s clearly something you would monitor over time,” Pearson’s spokesperson added. “If you got to a point where digital was growing extremely rapidly and print was falling very fast in a particular geographical area, that might be something you’d want to look at … on a case-by-case basis.”
Solomon, who doesn’t work in the FT Group but for its parent, as the head of global content standards, had said yesterday that the FT was “already pulling back” from paper, and was committing to “less print” toward “the sunset of print.”
“They do see that the sunset is going to be in about five years for them,” she said.