The Financial Times has been named Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards, which also saw awards and commendations for FT reporting, comment and cartoons.
What the judges said
‘Uncompromising in its core mission‘
The FT was “incomparably the best newspaper in the country”, the judges said.
The award, announced in London on Tuesday night, comes four months after the FT won Newspaper of the Year at the What The Papers Say awards.
Lionel Barber, editor, told staff on Wednesday: “We won the Premier League, and now we have won the Champions League. I am enormously proud of what the FT team has achieved in the past year. We have transformed the newsroom, produced world-class scoops, and our reporting and commentary on the credit crunch has won acclaim in London, New York and around the world.”
Gillian Tett was named best Business and Finance Journalist and was highly commended in the Reporter of the Year category for her coverage of the credit crunch.
There was “no columnist in Britain who is better connected” than Philip Stephens, who was named Political Journalist of the Year, the judges added.
Lucy Kellaway and Ingram Pinn were highly commended as Columnist of the Year and Cartoonist of the Year respectively.
The awards cap a year in which the Pearson-owned title has bucked an industry trend of falling circulation in developed newspaper markets. FT.com pioneered a new model for accessing its digital content during the year, and a brand campaign was launched under the banner of “We live in Financial Times”.
In the six months to February the FT’s circulation averaged 445,825, up 1.9 per cent year-on-year. FT.com averaged 5.7m monthly unique users in 2007, up 30 per cent, and averaged 6.2m users in January and February. The increase was driven by growing traffic to blogs, such as FT Alphaville, and a greater focus on online video.
