FOURTH ESTATE
Tattle tale. All good newsrooms are hotbeds of gossip, so it should come as no surprise that few places are as rife with rumour as the editorial offices of London’s premier financial daily. Yet even by those standards, what landed in our laps over the transom this week was top-shelf tattle.
Unburying the lede. The story, as recounted to us by several sources at the salmon-coloured daily, was that Jamil Anderlini (the FT’s former Asia editor who is currently serving as Politico Europe’s regional manager in Brussels) recently visited Japan, where he tried to sound out Nikkei, the FT’s owner, on whether they would be open to an approach by Axel Springer, Politico’s German parent.
The one that got away. Springer’s failed 2015 bid to acquire the FT was a corporate trauma for the annals. After wooing the FT’s then owner, Pearson, for more than a year, the Germans thought they’d secured the trophy, only to have Nikkei swoop in with a last-minute bid that bested Springer’s offer.
Rebound relationship. Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner was so discomposed by the jilting that he took what many considered the rash step just a couple of months later of acquiring Business Insider, a low-market American purveyor of corporate news. Springer shelled out $442 million, or more than ten times BI’s revenue, a price many considered excessive. (Acquisitions in the industry typically go for closer to five times turnover.)
Eying Wall Street. Even if the BI deal was pricey, it wasn’t a disaster. And yet…for a man who fancies himself a media mogul, it was clear that BI was essentially a poor man’s Wall Street Journal, one that lacked the ‘globalist elite’ cachet he was looking for. In recent years, Springer encouraged speculation that it was interested in the WSJ, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, most recently in an interview Döpfner gave to the FT last month. (Buying the WSJ is a long-shot, given that Murdoch went to great lengths to acquire it and has shown no sign of wanting to unload it.)
Opening the kimono. More revealing was that Döpfner also mentioned the FT, characterising it along with the Journal as “two super brands in the world that I’m very passionate about”.
Unorthodox. It would be out of the ordinary, to say the least, to dispatch a mid-level executive to Japan to test the waters for a deal of this size. This sort of discreet mission is usually undertaken by the investment bankers. But Springer is an unorthodox company, so you never know.
So what’s really going on? To find out, we approached Anderlini, who confirmed that he was recently in Japan. “It is true that I travelled to Tokyo in mid-December last year on holiday,” he said in an e-mail. “I met with my uncle, who does not work for Nikkei. I then travelled alone to my small apartment in the Echigo-Yuzawa ski and onsen resort, before returning to Brussels.”
Lost in translation. A senior source within Springer says that the whole idea about approaching Nikkei was Anderlini’s to begin with, but that in the end, he failed to even get a meeting with them.
Snow job? What isn’t in dispute is that the skiing this year in Japan has been lovely, with record snowfall in many places.
