Lunch with the FT, with the FT

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John Ridding thinks we should order our food before we start chatting. He knows best: as a journalist at the Financial Times, he wrote numerous editions of “Lunch with the FT,” the venerable feature in which the paper takes a notable person to a restaurant of their choice, and to which, on a roasting-hot day in central London, I’m subjecting Ridding himself. “I just love the format,” he tells me. “It’s a very good way of getting people to relax. And I love eating.” The craziest Lunch he ever had, he says, was with the Chinese author Yu Hua. They ate fried pigs’ livers and drank yellow rice wine, in homage to a character in one of Yu’s novels who fortifies himself with that meal while selling his blood. “We ended up getting completely sozzled,” Ridding recalls, with a laugh.

But yes, ordering. Ridding has a big dinner later, so he opts for two consecutive starters—broad beans with steamed couscous, cumin yogurt, coriander, and argan oil, followed by rillettes (essentially, shreds of pork meat and lard) with fino sherry and paprika, toast, and pickles—but he recommends that I have the charcoal-grilled lamb main (served with chickpea purée, tomato and spring onion salad, crispy capers, and churrasco sauce), and I follow his advice, after ordering my own starter of fried rabbit with rosemary muscatel dressing and green bean salad. He picks the wine, too. (Whether or not the guest should drink alcohol is a perennial “Lunch with the FT” controversy, so I leave the decision up to him.) We’re at Moro, an upmarket restaurant that serves “Moorish cuisine,” and have a window table looking out over a bustling pedestrian street. The table, Ridding explains, has been the site of much FT lore down the years (though “you have to be incredibly mindful of who’s around,” since “this is a bit of a media place”) and is his favorite, though he’s sometimes had to compete for it with Michael Palin, the Monty Python actor turned British national treasure, and the late British Iraqi starchitect Zaha Hadid. “Amazing architect, but bloody hell,” Ridding recalls. “She used to come here with her team, and she was one tough cookie. The whole restaurant would be entertained by Zaha Hadid just unleashing.”

The table has been a constant through Ridding’s tenure as the FT’s chief executive, which began in 2006 and concluded yesterday. During that time, he oversaw a remarkably successful transition into the digital age—the paper has often been hailed as a bright spot in a dark period for the media business—amid no little world-historical turbulence. He’s been at the FT even longer than that—he started out on the foreign desk in the late eighties, predating, as it happens, the birth of “Lunch with the FT.” (The feature celebrated its thirtieth birthday last year, when—as I discover only after having the very original idea to use the format to interview Ridding—Bron Maher of the UK media-news site Press Gazette took Janine Gibson, the FT’s weekend editor, to lunch to reflect on its success.) 

Gibson told Maher that the ideal Lunch guest is just about to leave a high-powered job, and has had three “acts” to their career. Luckily for me, Ridding ticks both boxes, having worked as a reporter, an editor and publisher, and then as an executive at the FT. It’s unusual for a journalist to vault over the wall separating the newsroom from the C-suite, and at the FT, Ridding says, the wall is “pretty steep.” When I ask why he made the leap, I expect an answer laden with business jargon, but this is not what I get. “I used to love writing features and interviews,” Ridding says, but he “struggled sometimes with really hard news,” since “news by definition is going to ruin somebody’s day, right? No news is good news.” I find this slightly strange: surely, being a CEO involves ruining people’s day sometimes, too? True, he says. “But I felt it was like every day in the newsroom.”

Ridding had also become increasingly involved in strategy in his prior role, working on the Asian edition of the FT. Becoming CEO was a steep learning curve nonetheless. But he was soon making highly consequential decisions. The cover price of the print edition went up, which was controversial within the newsroom. (When he emailed the staff to let them know, one economics correspondent replied-to-all saying that he hoped Ridding knew what he was doing. Ridding was “fuming,” and acted “a bit like Dr. Strangelove” as he tried not to send a reply he would regret, he recalls, physically restraining his hand by way of demonstration.) Then, the FT’s website put up a metered paywall, which now seems totally normal but was, at the time, pioneering, and controversial within the wider industry. The move was designed to generate revenue from Web content, guided by the principle that it was worth as much as print journalism. It ended up yielding highly valuable data on readers, too.

Around the same time, the financial crisis hit; it was broadly devastating for the media business, but the FT did okay, not least because people really needed the reliable financial information it offers. (“The FT generally has a good crisis,” Ridding says.) Other crises would follow, but before asking about those, I remember the Lunch format and ask how his broad beans are. (They’re “totally delicious,” he says, though he seems to be hankering for a minced-lamb flatbread that Moro no longer serves. It was “possibly the best single dish in the whole world,” he says. When it disappeared, “I had a conversation with the team, and they agreed for a while that they would continue to make it for me. And then I started to feel guilty because it was obviously a real pain in the arse.”) Niceties over, we move onto Brexit, which was not only a major economic shock, but also, I suggest, a philosophical one for the FT, as a bible of the international business elite. Ridding recalls going into the FT’s newsroom early the following morning—unusual for him, he says, since as a former FT journalist he’s “super sensitive to church and state”—and saw Lionel Barber, then the paper’s editor, sitting on a couch. “I thought, It’s really odd—we’re on the wrong side of history,” Ridding remembers. “My upbringing is very international. I grew up in Malaysia and Singapore and Hong Kong. I love international connections, international relations. It’s why I joined the FT.” A few months later, Theresa May, then Britain’s prime minister, said that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” The remark was at odds with “how I view the world as an FT person,” Ridding tells me. “I think we’re all proud to be citizens of the world.”

Still, this wasn’t a moment to bear a grudge, but to cover what was happening with fairness and curiosity, Ridding says. “The FT has a reputation—more than anyone, actually—for giving a fair perspective.” (“We’re always gonna be pro-business; that’s kinda what we do,” he adds. “But business done right.”) You’d expect the CEO of a major news organization to extol its open-mindedness, but, perhaps unexpectedly, the FT might actually have more cross-ideological appeal than most. While I was preparing for the Lunch, I revisited one of my all-time favorite CJR essays, from 2019, in which the socialist commentator Amber A’Lee Frost wrote that she prefers the FT to the New York Times because, while the latter paper obsesses over cultural liberalism, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.” (“Sure, they’re rooting for the other team, but at least they know the game.”) I put this to Ridding. He refuses to be drawn too much—church and state, again—but says that he’s always been struck by the FT’s independence, “personality,” and the rigor of its processes. He hasn’t written too often for the paper since becoming CEO (church and… you get the idea) but recalls doing so once—when he happened, as one does, to find himself on an Antarctic expedition with a world authority on emperor penguins—and being impressed by the granular questions that he faced from editors. (I ask if the piece was a news article. “A feature,” Ridding replies. “I didn’t ruin any emperor’s days. I helped the penguins, I hope.”)

The conversation turns, as it must over lunch these days, to Donald Trump. I ask Ridding what he makes of some news owners and executives in the US caving to Trumpian pressure. “My main thought, actually, is how incredibly fortunate we are to have Nikkei as an owner,” he says, without missing a beat. “Their steadfast support for editorial independence is inspiring, and it’s reassuring.” This wasn’t always a given: when Nikkei, the Japanese media company, acquired the FT from Pearson, a British firm focused mostly on education products, in 2015, some observers feared that the new owners might seek to pull punches in coverage of the business world, as Nikkei had been accused of doing in Japan. (Neither was it a given that Nikkei would wind up acquiring the FT. The paper’s own newsroom reported late in the day that Axel Springer was the favored candidate. Ridding tells me that he prepared two different speeches to read, depending on who prevailed.) Ridding, however, was assured that Nikkei would respect the FT’s independence. “They have been true to their word,” he says now. “They have not interfered at all in editorial, and on the business side, whenever we’ve needed support, they’ve been magnificent.”

There were also concerns, on the business side, that Japan’s consensual corporate culture might make Nikkei slow on key decisions. But Ridding dispels this idea. “It’s the ‘circle of trust,’” he says, referencing the movie Meet the Fockers. “If you’re inside the circle of trust, you really can make fast decisions. If you’re outside the circle of trust, you’re screwed, because you’re not going to get back in.” It’s unusual for a major Western media company to have Japanese owners, and I’m curious whether Ridding thinks their country of origin actually matters. “It matters a lot,” he says instantly. “There is a culture of craft and long-term perspectives.” It’s probably helped that Ridding is himself a Japanophile. During our lunch, he occasionally refers to colleagues (and himself) using the honorific –san. At a recent party in his honor, Roula Khalaf, the FT’s current editor, invoked the Vapors’ 1980 hit “Turning Japanese.” “There’s something in that,” Ridding says. (I suggest that Alphaville’s “Big in Japan” might also have been apt.) When we have Lunch, Ridding has just returned from a trip on which he paid a visit to “Kita-san” (Tsuneo Kita, the former Nikkei chairman), who gave him a piece of calligraphy from a Buddhist temple. Ridding was touched. “What it reminded me of is just how much emphasis they place on personal relationships,” he says.

It’s time for another glass of wine to fortify the discussion as it turns—again, inevitably—to artificial intelligence. In 2019, Kita told Nieman Lab that Nikkei was further along than the FT in its experimentation with AI, and would be able to help the paper on this front. Given the huge advances in the technology since then, I’m curious if this expertise has proved helpful, and Ridding suggests that it has. In general, “there were some big fundamental strategic calls, at the beginning, which was: Do we play, do we participate, or do we put up a big border?” Ridding says. “My instinct, and the FT’s instinct, has always been that there’s no point turning your back on tectonic change.” I bring up another past comment, from 2023, when Ridding said that ChatGPT cannot replicate the distinctive work the FT does. Has he changed his mind since then? No, he says—though if chatbots aren’t about to break news stories, he is keenly aware that they might stop readers from clicking on them, as search engines pivot away from walls of links toward text-based responses. Last year, the FT struck a licensing deal with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT—following in the footsteps of other publishers worldwide, but getting there sooner than British rivals. Ridding seems happy with the deal so far, though it’s still “a work in progress around the techniques to take the interested reader” through to the FT after seeing FT-informed summaries.

By now, he’s working his way through his rillettes, and I my lamb (which is perfectly pink, if not quite as good as the fried rabbit), so I figure it’s time for the Questions One Asks when someone is retiring. Why now? “I’m not actually retiring,” Ridding stresses—he’ll become a special adviser to Nikkei and honorary chair of the FT—but he feels that he’s achieved key objectives (an operating-profit benchmark set by Nikkei; a global paying audience of three million) and that a fresh perspective might be valuable in this era of growing disruption. (Jon Slade, formerly the FT’s chief commercial officer, is succeeding him.) The highlights of his tenure? Hitting a million paid-for users ahead of schedule, the Nikkei sale, and getting to travel around China as a journalist while its economy was booming. Regrets? Not implementing some of his changes faster, even if they ultimately worked. Also, the time that an FT-branded yacht crashed into the Sydney Opera House when the paper launched an Australian product in 2004. (Ridding, then the Asia publisher, was on the scene and thought he’d be in trouble with higher-ups. “In the end,” he says, “it was great marketing.”)

When “Lunch with the FT” turned thirty last year, Henry Mance, a journalist at the paper, compiled a typology of the six sorts of guest to have participated over the years. Of these, Ridding is clearly “the executive,” who, in Mance’s telling, is typically a boring guest who will, at some point, struggle to justify their pay. Ridding has not been boring company, but his pay has in the past been contentious: the most negative headlines I had managed to find from his time as CEO came in 2018, when unionized journalists at the FT complained that he had been excessively remunerated—the year before, he earned some three million US dollars—and eventually passed a vote of no confidence. Ridding turns pensive when I bring this up. “That was, without doubt, the single most painful episode” of his tenure, he says; his pay resulted from hitting targets resulting from the acquisition, based on a contract that he says wasn’t his decision, but at the same time, “I guess I should have understood that one of the things that makes the FT unique and special is that it’s very collegial, and very communitarian.” (And, he says, citing a former colleague, “like many media organizations, it’s pretty left-wing” in some respects. Maybe it’s not quite the other team.) When this went down, “I was on holiday, of course,” he says. “God knows how many holidays are ruined by crises; I can think of so many. But this was particularly bad. Most of my holiday was spent on the phone, taking heat, explaining, feeling pain, feeling terrible. When you’re as close to an institution like I am to the FT, it’s personal. It really hurts.” The FT, he adds, “will always challenge and will always speak truth to power. It’s what it does, whether the power’s internal or the power’s external.”

In the end, he gave back around a fifth of the pay packet, which fed into a fund aimed at addressing the FT’s gender pay gap. I ask him if he has any parting thoughts on the state of the labor market in journalism—those starting out or lower down the ladder can find it hard to make ends meet, I note—offering him a chance at a last-minute Marxist conversion. He laughs, then reflects on the “major talent war” that, he suggests, is making it harder to keep stars at the paper, and the need to balance this by remembering, at the same time, that journalism is a team sport. The FT doesn’t want to lose its sense of collegiality, he says. 

He seems to still be figuring out how to strike this balance, but he’s nearly out of time, and so are we. No dessert, but a double espresso, for him, and Earl Grey tea, for me. (Sadly, neither of us is sozzled.) We’ve established that Ridding is not retiring, but I’ve been sent a list of his hobbies—the soccer club Leeds United, jazz (he plays the trombone), Japan, and surfing—and so ask if he’ll at least have more time for them now. After some back-and-forth about a surfing spot near where I grew up, he tells me he’s about to give a speech to a group of students and plans to “pilot” a book that he’s going to write about leadership and surfing. “Partly because I’m hoping it’ll get me to Malibu and Maui on the speaking circuit,” he says. “But also because I think there’s something to this idea—particularly nowadays, when AI is disrupting everything—that trying to plan a specific career course is nuts, and therefore the real value is understanding where you fit in in an environment.” Good surfers can’t control the conditions, of course, but “will wait for the right wave. They’ll know if it’s the wave for them. Then they commit with full force.” Ridding suggests that he is less patient than this. “I’m always like, Go for a wave,” he says. He’s “wave hungry.”

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