Financial Times begins moving its blogs behind paywall

This move by the newspaper makes sense "in a kind of tyranny-of-consistency way," Felix Salmon wrote in his Reuters.com blog. "Blogs are a great way for a newspaper to add online value for their print subscribers: they can put nichey content like wonky posts on central banking online, without using up precious newsprint. But the FT doesn't give online access to its print subscribers: that's a key difference between the FT paywall and the one being proposed by the NYT. And print subscribers understandably don't particularly want to pay twice for the same content. So their relationship with the FT will necessarily weaken when they lose access to the blog content."

Now that Money Supply is behind a paywall, there is little to no chance its audience will grow, which means it will keep dropping down the FT's list of priorities, he stated.

Owned by Pearson, the FT last month pulled out of ABCe audits, making financial paper the UK's first national daily to drop its ABCe audit, which could lead to a complete review of the current auditing process in the country.

"Traditional measurements (ABCs and readership surveys) focus on one or the other and are not consistent across the globe. It's the quality of our registered and subscriber readership that matters to our advertisers, rather than volume," Ben Hughes, deputy chief executive of the FT, told MediaWeek at the time.