Financial Times
Over the past year the Financial Times has delivered world-class reporting and analysis, exposing abuses of power and unpacking complex financial and geopolitical stories at a time of global upheaval. On the year’s biggest financial story, the FT led the competition in the UK and around the world: the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the resulting banking crisis that also swept away Credit Suisse.
Among a relentless succession of top scoops from our corporate reporters, we broke the news that UBS had agreed to buy Credit Suisse for more than $2bn. Elsewhere, Madison Marriage and Antonia Cundy produced an exposé revealing allegations of sexual assault and harassment from 13 women who said they were abused by British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey. For the gripping 8,000-word story, they interviewed more than 40 former employees of Odey Asset Management, unearthing appalling abuses dating back to the 1990s.
Meanwhile the war in Ukraine has continued to be central to the news agenda, more than a year after the invasion. To mark the anniversary of the start of the war, Max Seddon led an extraordinarily detailed piece of reporting on Putin’s 11th-hour decision to invade, with unrivalled sourcing that showed the strike was planned with the assistance of just a handful of Kremlin officials. When the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin led his ill-fated march on Moscow in July, we were the first outlet to set up a dedicated live blog to report on the fast-moving and extraordinary story in real time, with maps and video.
Closer to home, the FT Weekend Magazine has run a number of superb British dispatches, notably Jennifer Williams’ devastating year-long reporting project from a state school on the front lines of the UK’s cost of living crisis. Helen Warrell went inside the shadowy world of female spies at MI6, a story that was among our most powerful online hits of the year, while Sarah Neville led our world-class science coverage with a deeply reported piece on the impact of microplastics on falling sperm counts. To complement our written reporting, we are also deploying an ever-evolving range of digital journalism tools. Key to this has been our new Visual Storytelling team, which combines coding, design and reporting skills to tell the biggest stories in innovative ways.
One of the team’s advanced projects was on the earthquake in Turkey, which showed readers how the failure to abide by stricter construction regulations led to a luxury development becoming a death trap on February 6. A year-long investigation by the Financial Times and the Royal United Services Institute also revealed for the first time how business figures in east Asia have helped facilitate illicit deliveries of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil to North Korea. Using groundbreaking visuals including CGI video, the FT combined expertise in investigative journalism, geopolitical affairs, open-source intelligence, data analysis and visualisation.