From Russia with love

Tuesday, Moscow, Irish pub, no Guinness. I last slept on Sunday night before leaving for Moscow on Monday evening and arriving in the early hours today (now yesterday at the time of publication). I could have kipped down in the transit lounge but chose instead to “do” Moscow in a day.

I turn up on the doorstep of an old friend, Neil Buckley, the FT’s Moscow Bureau Chief who opens the door in his pyjamas as if he does this all the time. I’ve known Neil a long time. He has just become a father for the second time and seems to be taking the new arrival in his stride. Well he can because the baby is back in the UK with his mum awaiting his visa. A few weeks old and he already has a passport. I hope the passport control people can tell it’s the little guy in the photograph.

The cabbie who brought me from the airport must have been a getaway driver before turning to taxis. He drives as if the rest of the road users are competitors in some big urban grand prix. Indeed he takes the chequered flag.

I ask him for a receipt and he proceeds to write what looks like a comprehensive précis of War and Peace. It’s the first receipt I’ve ever had in paperback. All that precious time won on the road is lost in the paperwork

Neil shows me how to use the Metro. I try to memorise things in the street: the advertising hording that looks like football jerseys on a washing line – that’s where we turned right. The station stops are in Cyrillic script so I count the stops and try to memorise the artwork at each of the stations.

He’s going to a conference so I leave him not far from the Kremlin. The Kremlin only takes about an hour – all that Russian history knocked off in a few camera shots. I stand in the road to get a cathedral in the frame. A policeman with a hat the size of a dinner plate blows his whistle in shrill sharp, bursts. He talks “whistle,” the language of officialdom everywhere, possibly because it is so easily understood. I translate this particular series of blasts as “get off the road and back behind the fence if you know what’s good for you.”

Red Square takes marginally less time than the Kremlin, I photograph St Basil’s Cathedral from every conceivable angle, onion by colourful onion. It’s easy to overdose on onion towers in Moscow. The Gum store is not what it was. You can buy things there these days.

There’s time to pop down to the Pushkin Museum that has one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. The Degas pastel drawings, the “Blue Dancers” and his “Nude wiping herself” are stunning. So is the Renoir “nude sitting on a couch.” No-one, not even Rubens, could do flesh like Renoir could do flesh.

There is Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard”, Matisse’s goldfish, Picasso’s “Young Acrobat on a Ball” and Monet’s “Luncheon on the grass.” I can’t think of another gallery anywhere that has this quality of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art concentrated together.

I call back at the FT office for my shoulder bag that weighs almost as much as my luggage after I stuffed my hand baggage with heavy stuff in a bid to escape excess baggage charges. I’m going fishing in Mongolia and fishing means a lot of gear. There’s not much room for luxuries such as clothes.

I’m wondering if I’ve seen the last of my bags. Even the Aeroflot woman at the check in desk in London seemed to have little faith that it would pass smoothly through transit in Moscow. “A lot gets lost,” she said reassuringly.

At the airport I ask the taxi driver for a receipt. This time it’s Anna Karenina. Where else could bureaucracy demand a record of payment that reads like a book plot with a twist at the end?

Newspapers and the web

In 1999 I took a year out of the FT to write a history book about work. On my return I was offered a secondment to create and edit the editorial side of FT CareerPoint, a newly established business managed by Peter Highland, an experienced and well respected manager from the publishing side of the newspaper.

It was a separate enterprise within the FT and we were starting from scratch, creating our own website from nothing. The FT already had FT.com up and running. I didn't think much of FT.com at that time. It was an unwieldy, over-engineered, over-manned and over-ambitious attempt to put the FT online that for the first few years of its life drained the profits from the newspaper. Countless millions of hard-won profit went down that particular hole.

Groping in the dark

The real problem with FT.com is that conceptually it was all wrong. Rather than explore the possibilities of this new web technology, the thinking behind it was what you might expect from people who knew newspapers. I distinctly remember David Bell, now director of people at Pearson, then chief executive of the FT, telling the troops that FT.com was going to happen. I'm quoting from memory, so these may not be his actual words, but he said something like this: "We don't know what the internet means but we think we have to be there." It was a pioneering spirit. It was also groping in the dark.

The result was rather one-dimensional. As far as I could see all that FT.com did that was different from the newspaper was to launch some stories faster than the daily publication schedule could achieve and store stories on line for later reference.

Storing stories would have been useful but the search mechanism was hopeless. At last, eight years on, it has been put right and the new system actually works. Hurrah!

Even the faster publication was not so significant a benefit since one of the greatest selling points of the FT was, and continues to be, the strength of its analysis. Any ticker tape can break a story. FT journalism fills in the details and adds a bit more. It is thoughtful journalism, the sort we still need.

I was proud of my time at FTCareerPoint because we tried to do some things that FT.com was not doing. We were trying to utilise the benefits of the web for storing data and lists that could be cross-referenced from the newspaper. We had salary details of every director in the FTSE 100; we had psychometric tests, we had "pass notes" on management gurus: all gone. People wonder why Craigslist is so successful. It is because there is so much stuff there, easily accessible. It doesn't try to be something it isn't.

We weren't afraid of experimenting. I told our web designers I wanted something that was human-looking and did not have lots of straight lines and clinically clicky boxes.

Early designs

I was amused to find this morning some of those early designs. If you look at the deliberately badly-drawn doors and the stick man you can see how that thinking was interpreted. Sadly our drafts were subjected to the scrutiny of the FT.com thought police. We had few friends there. I can't tell you how much they hated the stick man. I can't tell you how much I loved him.

Well the stick man was scrapped, the doors were straightened up and the site went live in late 2000. It was doing OK a year later, just about breaking even, but the FT.com losses and a big fall in the FT share price had led to crisis measures. Many of the smaller satellite projects were rolled up and ours was one of them. We had a great little team and every one of those people left. It was a crying shame.

I left too, very quietly. Even two years later many people on the newspaper did not know I had gone since my weekly column was still there. The FT was good to me. It was good for my career and we parted on good terms. In fact, six years on I do two regular columns and various other projects for the newspaper so it's still an important part of my income and, to be corporate for a second, my "brand". Today I think of myself as a kind of associate member of an exclusive club.

Many readers assume I am an employee. But I am not. Moreover I am proud of my independence. I continue to enjoy my connection with the FT that for all it's failings and it has them, like any family, is still one of the world's great newspapers. It's in safe hands too. Lionel Barber, it's editor, is a very fine journalist.

Magnate for minds

The old guard, or what's left of them, are spread around but they're in places that matter. I keep an eye out for my old friends Neil Buckley in Moscow, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Paul Betts in Paris and Victor Mallet in Hong Kong. A couple of years ago there was an Ex-FT reunion and I was astonished to see so many who had left.

We had some great times in the 1990s. The BCCI story won the reporter of the year award in the British Press Awards. That plus work we did on the Midland Bank and the arms-to-Iraq story won the FT Newspaper of the Year award in the What the Papers Say Award. Those really big awards have been thin on the ground in the past 10 years. But I shouldn't dwell on the past.

The internet is changing the newspaper industry. Some say newspapers are dying. But newspapers will still be there, long after I'm gone because they still work so well. The best of them are collectives of excellence. Today excellence is clustering , by choice, in various areas of the web. News organisations like the FT must learn to draw in that external thinking with a web-based offering that is broader and more immediate than a letters page. Blogging is one way. Instant commenting is another. If the FT can prove itself an accessible magnate for the sharpest minds its future will be assured.