Financial Times

Overview

The Financial Times is the British business newspaper printed on salmon-pink paper — a distinction it has held since 1893 — and one of the few news organizations that has spent the AI era both breaking the industry’s biggest stories and selling its own archive to the model builders. It was founded in 1888, bought by Japan’s Nikkei for £844 million in 2015, and has since become a fixture of the AI-deal news cycle: it reported Google’s ~$300 million investment in Anthropic in February 2023, signed a content-licensing deal with OpenAI in April 2024, and reported the Trump brothers’ positions in Skyline Builders through American Ventures in 2025 (PYMNTS; Reuters; CryptoSlate).

The pink paper: 1888 to Pearson

The FT started life in 1888 as a four-page publication targeted at readers in the City of London, and distinguished itself from rivals since 1893 with its salmon-pink paper — “a bold innovation that still makes it stand out on the newsstands today” (AFP). Its founding motto was to be a friend to the “Honest Financier” and the “Respectable Broker” in London’s financial trading hub, and it took “an unashamedly free-market position” (AFP).

In 1945 the paper merged with the less successful Financial News, and in 1957 it was acquired by Pearson, its owner for nearly six decades (AFP). The paper broadened from markets coverage into business, economic, and political news and comment — exemplified by its Lex column — while maintaining a foreign-correspondent network as rivals cut overseas staff (AFP). By 2015 it published five editions (UK, Europe, US, Asia, Middle East) plus a Chinese version, printed six days a week including a Saturday weekend edition, and employed about 2,000 people, 600 of them in editorial — proudly describing itself under the masthead as a “World Business Newspaper” (AFP).

The digital business and the Nikkei sale

The FT was early to the internet and early to charging for it: FT.com launched in 1995, and the paper was among the first to introduce a paywall for its website, in 2001 (AFP). By 2015, digital subscriptions accounted for 70 percent of a 720,000 total circulation, and the paper reached more than two million readers each day — selling more copies overseas than in Britain (AFP).

On July 23, 2015, Japan’s Nikkei Inc agreed to acquire Pearson’s FT Group for £844 million (about US$1.3 billion) (Bloomberg). The sale excluded Pearson’s 50 percent stake in the Economist Group and the paper’s London property; Germany’s Axel Springer had also been in talks for the assets (Bloomberg). Pearson CEO John Fallon said the industry had reached “an inflection point… driven by the explosive growth of mobile and social,” and that “the best way to ensure the FT’s journalistic and commercial success is for it to be part of a global, digital news company” (Bloomberg). The FT Group had posted 2014 revenue of £334 million and £24 million in adjusted operating profit (Bloomberg).

The AI era: scoop source and licensor

In February 2023, the FT reported that Google had confirmed a roughly $300 million investment in the AI firm Anthropic, giving it about a 10 percent stake — news that landed alongside the companies’ February 3 announcement that Anthropic had chosen Google as its preferred cloud provider, weeks after Microsoft’s $10 billion OpenAI investment (PYMNTS). The original FT story was not read in full for this profile; the investment and the FT’s role in confirming it are stated as reported by PYMNTS.

Then the FT became a participant in the AI economy itself. On April 29, 2024, it signed a deal with OpenAI to license its content for the development of AI models and to let ChatGPT answer queries with summaries attributable to the newspaper (Reuters). Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal followed similar OpenAI tie-ups with Axel Springer, Le Monde, and Prisa Media; it would enhance ChatGPT with archived FT content, the firms would jointly develop new AI products for FT readers, and the AI-generated summaries would link back to the newspaper (Reuters). “We’re keen to explore the practical outcomes regarding news sources and AI through this partnership,” said FT Group CEO John Ridding (Reuters).

The paper’s investigative role continued into 2025–2026: FT reporting established that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump bought into the Nasdaq-listed Skyline Builders in August 2025 through American Ventures — a special purpose vehicle run by a Dominari subsidiary — and added to the position on October 28, 2025, and identified Kaz Resources (tied to Cove Kaz) as the vehicle behind Skyline’s minerals move (CryptoSlate). The FT’s own account carried the central caveats: there was no suggestion the brothers knew Cove was close to securing U.S. administration backing when they invested, or that they influenced it, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesperson described him as a passive investor with no operational role (CryptoSlate). These facts come from a secondary summary of the FT’s reporting, not from the original FT story, and the profile states that plainly.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the FT’s current subscriber count — the commonly cited ~1.2–1.3 million digital figure was not verified in a fully-read source; the verified figure is the 2015 circulation of 720,000 (70% digital). It does not name the current editor. It does not claim the financial terms of the OpenAI deal (undisclosed) or the performance of the FT’s AI products since. The Skyline/American Ventures facts rest on a tier-3 secondary summarizing FT reporting; the original FT story was not read in full. The paper’s German edition closed in 2012; no claim is made about editions launched or closed after 2015.