FT Magazine

Over the past year, FT Weekend Magazine has grown its audience, deepened engagement and produced ever more ambitious journalism. In particular, the team has focused on impact and innovation, cementing the magazine’s status as a world-class home for powerful reporting and literary journalism.

A highlight was the Crispin Odey investigation, which detailed decades of sexual assault allegations against the British hedge fund manager from 13 women. Within a week of the FT magazine's exposé, Odey was being investigated by regulators and his $4bn company was being dissolved.

The 8,000-word narrative, reported over many months, treated the accounts of the women involved with the sensitivity and integrity their experiences demanded. It remains one of the most-read FT stories of the past year.

Our strategy of producing fewer, stronger pieces with an emphasis on storytelling has resulted in many other coups. We reported on the final hours of Sam Bankman-Fried's reign at FTX; published a dispatch from China's secret Covid-19 prisons; and secured the first-ever interviews with MI6 agents.

The magazine’s exclusive interview with X CEO Linda Yaccarino made news, as did investigations into Britain’s crumbling schools and tragedies on the London tube. We also brought new voices into our pages, such as novelists Marlon James and John Banville, and produced a special issue in which wine critic Jancis Robinson answered 121 of readers’ most pressing questions.

The team has also innovated in its storytelling. For an investigation into the lives of migrant fishermen from the Philippines in the UK, a multi-disciplinary team of designers, editors, coders and producers worked together for weeks. The online version of the award-winning piece incorporated data, video and maps to convey the experience of its characters in rich, multifaceted detail.

In a first for the magazine, the free-to-read piece was simultaneously translated into Filipino to ensure our reporting had an impact in communities that do not traditionally have access to the FT. Similarly ambitious storytelling collaborations resulted in numerous crossover episodes with FT Weekend Podcast.

These journalistic successes have translated into business gains, with a 25 per cent jump in print advertisement pages and an 800 per cent increase in social media referrals.

Most importantly, the magazine continues to deepen its relationship with readers, who spend an average of 66 minutes a week with each issue, the longest of any FT section and up significantly from 2018. All of this points to the FT Weekend Magazine’s success in championing the best of in-depth, long-form storytelling.