On January 9 1995, a gormless 25-year-old in a bad suit started work at the Financial Times. My preparation had been a degrading four-month training course in a dead former seaside resort, where I woke up each morning feeling dumber than the day before, but work was worse. The building’s windows didn’t open. Canteen lunch was revolting. When darkness fell in mid-afternoon, I realised that some adults never experienced sunlight on winter weekdays.
The work seemed dull and incomprehensible, yet the two poor sods babysitting me were still bashing on their plastic keyboards at 7pm, when the newspaper “went to bed”. We didn’t have a website then.
I trekked home that evening sensing I’d chosen the wrong employer. I did leave in 1998, crushed by the tedium of writing the daily currencies report, but I drifted back in 2002. This week is my 30th anniversary at the FT. To see how the paper had changed, I went to the British Library to find the edition of January 9 1995.
The library printed me a reader’s card with a brand-new photo. The picture confirmed that I had changed beyond recognition since 1995. I expected the FT would have too. As so often in my journalistic career, I was wrong.
When I fed the microfilm into the library’s machine, a newspaper popped up that looked startlingly like today’s: in its layout, the lengths of articles and the unshowy, untrendy, understated prose, written to be comprehensible to non-native English-speakers. Several of that day’s bylines were for colleagues still writing today.
What was most spookily familiar, though, was the content. The front-page lead that morning was about infighting within Britain’s ruling Conservative party over Europe. The government was also denigrating civil servants.
Another front-page story, by our Moscow bureau chief Chrystia Freeland (now potentially Canada’s next prime minister), recounted the brutal Russian invasion of Chechnya. In a photograph, demonstrators in Berlin held a sign saying, “Today Chechnya — tomorrow the whole north Caucasus.” There was “rising east-west tension over Chechnya and Moscow’s cancellation of German-Russian military manoeuvres”, but Germany’s defence minister said: “At this precise moment it would be wrong to scale down contacts.”
There’s a saying in journalism that there are no new stories, only new reporters. Certainly, reading that newspaper, I had a sense of news as an eternal cycle of repetition with minor variations. China was “facing a looming trade war with the US over infringement of patents and copyrights”. Madrid had ordered a “corruption probe”. A French Eurosceptic was running for president.
One columnist assailed what’s now called “woke” language: “Being dim, for example, is called attention deficit disorder if one is working class or mild dyslexia if middle class.” Scrolling the microfilm back a few days, I saw that Labour’s leader Tony Blair wanted “to drop threat of VAT on school fees”. History definitely rhymes.
There were occasional hints of the world of 2025. China was expanding currency trading “to broaden its fledgling market-style financial system”. And Europeans would need private pensions as they lived longer, or else “their social security systems will be beyond reform in the next century”.
Entirely absent from that edition, even from the section on “Media Futures”, is the internet. That May, FT.com launched. The internet would eventually devastate countless media, but the FT now has 1.4mn paying readers, which is about four times our daily circulation in 1995. Unwittingly, I had joined one of the only going concerns in journalism. I chose the right job. True, that partly reflects my lack of any alternative skillset: I wasn’t going to open the batting for England. More than that, though, I still identify with what I see as the FT’s mission: to cover economic, financial and political power. We mostly write about stuff that matters.
Thinking back to the two people who babysat me that first day, I no longer believe they were beaten-down wage slaves who had resigned themselves to this life. I think they bashed away all day because they cared about their work. One is still at the FT. The other, the exemplary Rod Oram, put in over 40 years in journalism before dying of a heart attack in New Zealand last March, aged 73, while training to cycle from Beijing to Birmingham.
Had I known on January 9 1995 that I’d still be here 30 years later, I would have been horrified. It actually hasn’t been so bad.
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