Financial Times launches ‘Tilt’, emerging-markets focused site

The Financial Times has launched a subscription based site that deals only with emerging markets called “FT Tilt“. The site describes itself as “a premium online financial news and analysis service from the Financial Times, focused exclusively on the emerging world. It is aimed at finance professionals who require highly granular information on companies and markets beyond the developed G3 economies.”

Paul Murphy, editor-in-chief of FT Tilt explained the name of the new site:

“Recent years have seen economic power shift—or tilt—south and east. This trend is accelerating rather than diminishing and we see strong demand from our core professional readers for increasingly granular news and insight in markets beyond the developed G3 economies.”

The goal is to leverage the FT’s global network of journalists and combine contributions from a community of financial professionals to publish their research and analysis. A network of dedicated writers stationed in a series of regional bureaux is providing detailed coverage of high growth markets in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Felix Salmon, over at Reuters does a good job in listing all the challenges that Tilt will face:

“Tilt is built to allow clients to republish their own work and to talk to each other and comment on stories. But because Tilt isn’t available on Reuters or Bloomberg machines, traders aren’t going to see its stories effortlessly shuffled in to their main feed of news and analysis…

…they want to change the way those professionals consume media on a day in and day out basis—adding an extra site where those professionals feel they must spend valuable time.”

Essentially, Murphy is asking his overstretched journalists (just one person for all of Latin America, for instance) to tell financial professionals something they don’t already know: that’s a tall order.

Overall, Mr Felix says that “Tilt” shows that the FT is retreating to a newsletter model and that this is “a sad and narrow fate for what should be a proud and global newspaper.”