It never even made it to its first birthday. FT Tilt, the high-priced emerging-markets blog launched with some fanfare in January, has now quietly died.
This is a sad day: Tilt was run by the FT’s two most innovative journalists, Paul Murphy and Stacy-Marie Ishmael, and was a bold attempt to view the developing world from a novel perspective. The FT could and should learn a lot from Tilt’s innovations, not least the rich and various forms of engagement it had with its readers.
The FT should also learn from Tilt’s failures, which are to be found in the business model rather than in the journalism. Tilt was a blog run by a small team of smart young journalists — but it was priced at thousands of dollars a year, and I could never understand where the value was meant to lie. Those journalists had amazing sources and language skills in countries around the world, but they were ring-fenced from the FT itself, and didn’t really contribute noticeably to the newspaper. Ironically, they might actually contribute more now, going forwards, in the wake of Tilt’s execution: FT spokeswoman Darcy Keller tells me that the newspaper is trying to find jobs for them. I hope it does; as Stacy says, they have done tremendous work, and deserve to be rewarded for it.
The model of charging very large amounts of money for information about global markets which is relatively cheap to collate just doesn’t seem to work — Tilt is now dead, and Roubini.com is up for sale. The fact is that smart, economically-literate people are never going to be that cheap — so you need to have some kind of decently-sized market for what they do. And both Tilt and Roubini.com have been priced way too high to reach even a four-digit subscriber base. What’s more, these kind of services get better as their audience grows — they learn from their audience. Keeping the audience artificially tiny by implementing a massive paywall is self-defeating.
No startup ever achieves success in less than one year, so the FT’s decision with respect to Tilt does seem hasty. What they should have done is make Tilt free to all FT subscribers, and see if it took off that way. FT Alphaville has proved that bloggy brand extensions can be extremely successful, if done right, and Tilt’s material was certainly of great interest to a very important part of the FT’s global audience.
It’s good for media companies to experiment, and it’s necessary that some of those experiments fail. But I don’t think that FT Tilt failed, in terms of its core journalistic output. I think that the FT got greedy for subscription revenues from day one, and never let Tilt grow and thrive as it could and should have done. I absolutely blame the overlords for this one, not the people who did the real work.
@7 months ago
#FT #Tilt #RIP
** Santander , the euro zone’s largest lender, plans
to join forces with private equity firm Apax to buy KBC’s
controlling stake in Poland’s Kredyt Bank ,
worth about $1 billion, sources told Reuters on
Thursday.** Tokio Marine Capital, a Japanese private equity firm
affiliated with Tokyo Marine Holdings , has launched the
sale of drugmaker Showa Yakuhin Kako Co in a deal that could be
worth as much as 70 billion yen ($905 million), according to
three people with direct knowledge of the matter.** Oil and gas firm Ophir Energy has agreed to buy
Dominion Petroleum in a 118 million pound ($186
million) all-share deal that will expand its portfolio of
projects in East Africa.
@7 months ago with 28 notes
#Deals #of #the #day #mergers #and #acquisitions
The coastal country has all the makings for a vibrant tourism business, they say: warm weather, beaches, antiquities and proximity to Europe — all factors that helped the industry thrive in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.If developed, tourism could eventually help dent Libya’s high jobless rate by creating work for tour guides, drivers, restaurant workers and hotel staff, as well as help it diversify its economy away from dependency on oil and gas.The fact that operators are thinking about resuming business at all — some predicted tourists would start arriving again within a year — testifies to the relative peace that has prevailed in Tripoli and other parts of Libya since the former rebels ousted Muammar Gaddafi’s forces from the capital in August.One company, Sherwes Travel, already advertises a three-day, 295-euro tour of “post-war Libya” on its website, featuring visits to sites in Tripoli and to the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna. Employees admit it may be a bit optimistic.”The tour was very popular, actually. But not now, not yet,” said Ibrahim Usta, the company’s self-described international customer assistant. He said while some potential visitors had been in touch, it was not yet possible to bring them to Libya.”We have many inquiries right now, but the problem is mainly security and visas,” he said. “There’s no (visa) system in place and many embassies are not functioning.”Usta and others said tourism was languishing before the revolt because of apathy, incompetence, complex visa requirements, draconian police oversight and mercurial regulations under Gaddafi’s government.Sabri Ellotai, manager of Sabri Tours and Travel, described bringing a group of Germans in 2009 only to have them turned away at the airport because they did not have an Arabic translation for their passports — a requirement he had never heard of before.”I heard about it (the law) at the airport,” Ellotai said, shaking his head.He and others said they hoped the country’s new rulers — currently represented by the interim National Transitional Council (NTC) — would be able to do more with the industry when the war is over.NTC forces are still fighting to take over Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte and a few other bastions of Gaddafi loyalists, which has impeded efforts to set up effective government nationwide and restart oil production.WEEDS AND RUINSLibya’s lucrative oil and gas industry made tourism less of a priority than in Egypt and Tunisia, where it was a major contributor of jobs and foreign revenues before the uprisings in those countries.Libyan central bank official Ali Shnebesh estimated tourism could account for between 3 and 4 percent of the economy within five to ten years, depending on how much effort the country’s new government puts into it.”It would decrease unemployment, since we have a lot of areas that are good for tourism,” he said. “It would put thousands of our people to work in these places in many sectors — telecommunications, transportation, hotels — everywhere.”It is difficult to tell how much tourism contributed to Libya’s economy before the revolt because it was not tracked as a separate industry in central bank records, but Shnebesh estimated it was below half a percent of gross domestic product.That compares to Egypt, for instance, where officials said it accounted for over 11 percent before the revolt.There is plenty of evidence of the lax oversight at the ancient Greek colony of Cyrene, which was featured in the chronicler Herodotus’s “The Histories” and is now a UNESCO world heritage site, in the eastern Jebel al-Akhdar region.The site is overgrown with weeds and graffiti etched onto one of its old columns. A renovation crew of Italians, Americans and French fled after the uprising started, guards there said.Jamal Salem, 50, sitting in the afternoon sun outside a souvenir shop filled with woven baskets, photographs and ceramic statues still on display, said there weren’t many visitors even before the revolt.”A lot of people think Libyans are terrorists, and so they’re afraid of coming here,” he said. “We hope the picture will become clearer now, and that things will get better.”GUNS IN THE MEDINAOthers lingering in the area of Cyrene said they also hoped the revolt would help stamp out what they saw as widespread corruption and regional favoritism in the industry.”Before, companies had their headquarters in Tripoli. They brought the cars from Tripoli, they brought the translators from Tripoli, everything. Nobody here benefited from it at all,” Hussein Saleh, who volunteered to help guard Cyrene, said.Others near Cyrene and other sites said they also hoped a new government would show more interest in preserving relics.”We’re expecting a better future, and maybe more interest in renovating the antiquities,” said Muftah Mabrook, a 35-year-old researcher at the ancient Greek port of Apollonia, a picturesque collection of columns and other ruins set against the sea.While such ambitions are running high, it’s too soon to say how the situation will turn out.Tripoli’s atmospheric old city is slowly coming back to life as jewelry shops and cafes reopen up in its winding streets, for instance, but many alleys are still littered with bullet casings.In some areas, young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles sit smoking and chatting on stoops or around street corners. They are friendly, for the most part, as they smile and wave at foreign passersby, but their presence is not likely to encourage most holidaymakers.The relative lack of English and French language speakers, as well as the ban on alcohol, may also make it hard for Libya to compete on a large scale with Egypt and Tunisia even after the war is finished, some operators say.But Usta, like many others, was confident the industry would eventually thrive.”We have everything. We have the desert, we have the sea, we have mountains. We just need the right people in the right place.”
@7 months ago with 60 notes
#Libya #tour #operators #eye #postwar #boom #for #neglected
