Friday, November 6, 2009

Meet and Greet Breakfast with Financial Times

I accepted an invitation from Financial Times PR Agency Fleishman-Hillard for a Meet and Greet Breakfast with Financial Times late last month. I believe that they had invited many bloggers who write about Financial issues for the breakfast session. I accepted the invitation because I was pondering "Why not"? Free breakfast, free talk and force me to start the day early.

The breakfast serves as an introductory meeting for bloggers and FT Regional Online Director Hiroko Hoshino where she updates up FT.com's new initiatives and the recent launch of http://www.howtospendit.com/. Her objective is to help bloggers get easier access to search for credible news, information and commentaries via the FT platform so that we can write better and quality articles.

Mr Kevin Brown, FT Southeast Asia Bureau Chief was also present to showcase the strength of Financial Times and their articles. He also briefly shared on the trend of readership locally and worldwide and reveal why they are able to achieve the unprecedent rise in readership.
I gave my comment about the readerability of the howtospendit.com and that it is not suitable for the local market in Singapore. I also commented that most people will be contented with the Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters news where they provide news for free. Financial Times only allow 2 articles for public and 10 articles per 30 days for registered readers which is far too little.
Kevin replied by giving a lot of examples on how different FT is from Bloomberg and TR and cited that to enable quality articles to be written, good and sharp editors should be retained.

I was sceptible with what he said and I registered myself in FT.com and started to read some of their articles. I noticed that it contains many analysts who write without vested interest compared to those written by Fund managers. I can find investor's view on all regions and even commodities and currencies.

I was given a 6 months free subscription to FT for attending the breakfast session. Good chance for me to use their info for my future postings.

1 comment:

Derek said...

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for the insight into the event. I too received an invitation but found it weird that the event is held at 8am on a weekday. I thought it was going to be some sales talk. Anyway, I couldn't make it either.

Hope to hear more about you on this.

Cheers!