Face and fortune

Can a redesign of the Financial Times's Saturday edition boost the pink 'un's flagging fortunes? Andreas Whittam Smith tries it for size

The Financial Times has given itself a makeover. Most newspapers do from time to time, though I am not a fan of the process. I doubt many readers say to themselves as they turn the pages – gosh, this really does need redesigning. And when their favourite features are moved to new positions, they feel as annoyed as supermarket shoppers do when they find, say, that breakfast cereals are no longer in their accustomed place.

Newspaper production staff, too, often act as if they believed that the appearance of pages was more important than the quality of the articles themselves. If only the design of the paper could be improved, they tell themselves, all would be well. Not so. On the whole, the great newspapers of the world, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, don't do it, or, if they do, they make such modest changes that hardly anybody notices. In my unpublished list of the 10 greatest mistakes I made as this newspaper's first editor, changing our original design comes near the top. It was in this truculent mood that I turned to the new-look FT on Saturday.

It now comes in three sections: news, Money and Business, and Weekend, plus a new glossy magazine. I went first to the Money and Business section, for that is the heart of the newspaper on a Saturday morning. On this day readers want to concentrate on their own financial affairs rather than on their daily business, on the personal rather than the corporate. What is striking is that this section has been given a proper front page of its own; in others words, it begins with news that is relevant to the personal, rather than overblown features. The top story was a well-informed piece about trends in the residential property market, where first-time buyers are retreating from the bottom end and foreign investors are steering clear of the top. It made a good start to the section. Then follow some pages of company news with more investment comment, I am pleased to note, than the newspaper has provided recently. If you are managing your own portfolio of shares, this is essential reading.

Next, after pages of share prices and other essential information, comes a review of the week; included in the retrospective material was a piece by Vince Heaney. I read Mr Heaney with attention because for some months his comments have accorded with my own bearish views. If you have an unpopular, pessimistic attitude towards the stock market you need the comfort of finding that you are not alone. Imagine my surprise in finding that Mr Heaney has started to change his mind and now thinks the chances of a further dip in prices unlikely – oh dear, precisely what I have been waiting for before committing funds again. Making me question my attitude to equities in this way is a real benefit and itself worth much more than the £1 cover price.

It isn't easy to assess the FT's new glossy magazine. These things don't necessarily work for readers right away. For instance, the Independent on Sunday's new magazine, Talk of the Town, has gradually hooked me because every week I find some things I read right through to the end. Newspaper magazines are like a buffet lunch or supper, one picks at various dishes looking for something tasty. And now that I am a 65-year-old seen-and-read-too-much type, of course I am hard to please. My favourite weekly journal is neither The Economist, nor the Spectator nor the New Statesman but The Times Literary Supplement. Scholarly reviews of scholarly subjects are what I most enjoy. And, funnily enough, Talk of the Town can hit the same spot.

So without too much hope of finding sustenance, I flip the pages of the Financial Times Magazine. The first article has this phrase picked out: "They didn't remove Bill's kidneys. They're left to shrivel up". No thank you. Then a few itsy-bitsy items: an interview with the Spanish prime minister's wife, and finally we arrive at the main dishes, two authoritative articles by experienced reporters, one on Tony Blair and what motivates him, drawn from interviews with friends, the other a piece of reportage from post-war Iraq. Both are no doubt excellent, but I don't tarry. I turn a page and then I am captured – by the FT's classical music critic, Andrew Clark, writing about the mighty diva Jessye Norman, and recounting his interview with her. I read it all the way through. Things are getting better. I enter the books section. There is a review of Repetition by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French writer I have never quite dared to tackle, put off by his reputation as the founder of the nouveau roman tradition. But as I am greatly enjoying a novel, La Télévision, by a younger writer often mentioned in the same context, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, I am grateful for the Robbe-Grillet piece. And that's enough, actually. Having found two enjoyable reads this time, I shall look again next week.

Back to my grumpy mood as I contemplate FT Weekend. I don't read travel articles, almost invariably the product of freebies. I don't care about cars. Style is not something that detains me. We have a small London garden, but we get excellent people to come and do it for us. But there on the front page of the section is my favourite wine writer, Jancis Robinson. I have total faith in her knowledge and in her judgement. And she writes in an agreeable, unfussy, informative style. I have two complaints, though. She doesn't write often enough. And when she does, she doesn't pay as much attention to delicious burgundy as I should like. This time her subject was bordeaux and she had something very interesting to say about prices.

Finally, I start on the news section. And I read with astonishment the first sentence of the top story on the front page. Here we are, living in historic times, with the Middle East still in turmoil, with a global health scare, with some major economies flirting with deflation and this is what the FT thinks is the most important news of the day: "The government plans to allow drivers to use motorway hard shoulders in a bid to ease jams in the country's worst traffic congestion hotspots". Hard shoulders? Wow! I can guess what has led to this serious misjudgement of news values. The newspaper has had an exclusive interview with the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling. It is boring, as on-the-record talks with ministers tend to be. So instead of relegating the useless material to an inside page, the newspaper leads off with the best bit it can find – driving on hard shoulders! And here is, plain for all to see, the next aspect of the Financial Times that the new reforming editor, Andrew Gowers, must tackle: its strange lack of judgement in the heart of the news operation.

A life in the pink: the editor's CV

Andrew Gowers has been editor of the Financial Times for nearly two years and has presided over some of the paper's most troubled periods of recent times. He has been with the FT for 20 years.

Gowers, 44, worked first on the foreign desk and then as agriculture correspondent and later as commodities editor. After being appointed in turn foreign editor, Middle East editor and then deputy editor, he had his first taste of life at the helm of the paper in 1997, when the former editor, Richard Lambert, was forced to go to America to oversee the FT's American launch.

In spite of all hispreparation for the FT editorship, Gowers could not have foreseen the problems that hit the paper soon after he took charge in July 2001. Declining business confidence, corporate scandals in America and the September 11 attacks all damaged the paper's fortunes. Annual profits first slumped from £81m to £31m and then dropped again to £1m last year.

Last year, the circulation of the FT, which had risen inexorably since the early Nineties, fell by 6 per cent. Advertising revenue fell by almost a quarter.