FT & The City: Build Community & Engagement
- The Financial Times (FT) and The City are employing innovative strategies to deepen audience engagement and foster stronger communities.
- Hannah Sarney, editorial product director and executive editor at the Financial Times, highlighted the importance of owned spaces in cultivating trust.The FT has maintained its comment sections, bucking...
- The challenge, according to Sarney, lies in expanding community participation.
The Financial Times and The City are revolutionizing community engagement. Discover how the FT is deepening trust thru its comment sections—comment readers are eleven times more engaged—while testing AI-powered moderation and question generation to boost participation.Learn, too, how The City strategically employs postal targeting, connecting directly with New York communities impacted by thier reporting, proving more effective than Facebook ads. News Directory 3 has the story: These organizations are committed to data-driven strategies. Explore the innovative tactics of these news sources. Discover what’s next in audience engagement.
Financial Times and The City Enhance Community Engagement Strategies
Updated May 29, 2025
The Financial Times (FT) and The City are employing innovative strategies to deepen audience engagement and foster stronger communities. Speaking at the World News Media Congress in Krakow, representatives from both organizations shared their approaches to building trust and sparking participation.
Hannah Sarney, editorial product director and executive editor at the Financial Times, highlighted the importance of owned spaces in cultivating trust.The FT has maintained its comment sections, bucking the trend of publishers who shut them down a decade ago. Sarney noted that comment readers are 11 times more engaged than non-readers, while comment writers are 48 times more engaged.
The challenge, according to Sarney, lies in expanding community participation. Currently, only half of the FT’s audience reads comments, and a mere 4% contribute. She believes many readers are unaware of the prospect to engage.
To address this, the FT is testing several new initiatives to boost community engagement.These initiatives aim to spark participation, protect civility, and foster togetherness within their online spaces, enhancing their community building efforts.
- An AI moderation tool from Utopia helps support the moderation team.The tool learns from moderator decisions, keeping “the human in the loop,” Sarney said.
- An AI-powered tool generates questions from articles to prompt engagement in the comments section. Editors select the most appropriate question for each story.
- The FT is redesigning its live reader Q&A feature to improve mobile user experience, clarify roles, and facilitate easy catch-up after events.
Nic Dawes, executive director of The City, discussed how the organization creatively uses postal targeting to reach new audiences, notably those most affected by their reporting. This approach helps The City connect with New York communities directly.
Dawes cited a story about landlords failing to provide adequate heating. The City identified zip codes with the highest density of heating complaints and sent postcards to residents in those areas. This method proved more effective than Facebook ads, with postcard recipients more likely to read and spend time with the stories.
The City has also used postal outreach to target audiences near Superfund sites. Dawes emphasized that when surveying audiences, they focus on “what the journalism helped them do,” rather than simply asking if they liked the piece.
What’s next
Both the Financial Times and The City plan to continue refining their audience engagement strategies, focusing on data-driven insights and innovative tools to build stronger, more connected communities.