From EurActiv's The Chattering Class newsletter, March 15:
FOURTH ESTATE
Tattle tale. All good newsrooms are hotbeds of gossip, so it should come as no surprise that few places are as rife with rumour as the editorial offices of London’s premier financial daily. Yet even by those standards, what landed in our laps over the transom this week was top-shelf tattle.Unburying the lede. The story, as recounted to us by several sources at the salmon-coloured daily, was that Jamil Anderlini (the FT’s former Asia editor who is currently serving as Politico Europe’s regional manager in Brussels) recently visited Japan, where he tried to sound out Nikkei, the FT’s owner, on whether they would be open to an approach by Axel Springer, Politico’s German parent.
The one that got away. Springer’s failed 2015 bid to acquire the FT was a corporate trauma for the annals. After wooing the FT’s then owner, Pearson, for more than a year, the Germans thought they’d secured the trophy, only to have Nikkei swoop in with a last-minute bid that bested Springer’s offer.
Rebound relationship. Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner was so discomposed by the jilting that he took what many considered the rash step just a couple of months later of acquiring Business Insider, a low-market American purveyor of corporate news. Springer shelled out $442 million, or more than ten times BI’s revenue, a price many considered excessive. (Acquisitions in the industry typically go for closer to five times turnover.)....
....MUCH MORE
