Andrew Gowers, editor of the U.K. based ‘Financial Times‘, plans to bring the 117 year old ‘Friend of the Honest Financier and the Respectable Broker’ to a BlackBerry near you.
Gowers states, “There is a very great potential overlap between the sort of people who own BlackBerrys and the sort of people who read, or should read the FT.” The ‘Financial Times‘ editor plans to make the FT the first newspaper in the world to be delivered by BlackBerry.
Earlier this year, Gowers went to Canada to meet Jim Balsillie, chief executive of Research in Motion (RIM), the Toronto-based company behind BlackBerry. “Most existing websites are too voluminous and clunky and don’t look good on BlackBerry,” says the FT editor. “I said, ‘What do we need to do to be more BlackBerry friendly?’ We then produced a streamlined version of the site.”
The ‘Financial Times‘ is already a model for integration between print and online media. Gowers states that American publications often come and visit to get ideas for their own print and online integration.