Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Giving the Financial Times an “edge” for more than 20 years.

Press Profiles: What's their story?

As a little kid, Andrew Edgecliff Johnson would read his father’s Financial Times. It’s no wonder that he wuld grow up and spend his career at the venerable global news organization. On this edition of Press Profiles, we sit down with the man they call “Edge” to discuss his role as US Business Editor, the 5 speeds of news coverage, the politics of ESG, champagne and sword tricks, his grandparents' wartime love letters, his blunt but practical advice for PR professionals, and of course, a whole lot more.

Listen via the player below, or by visiting wherever you get your podcasts.

ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I am Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. I'm the U.S. Business Editor of The Financial Times, and this is Press Profiles. (MUSIC)

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Welcome back, everybody, to Press Profiles. I'm Russell Sherman. Hope you had a terrific July 4th holiday. Today, we are sitting down with one of The Financial Times' more senior and tenured journalists, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. We're going to turn the tables on the man they call "Edge."

We'll talk about his entrée into journalism, translating the language of money, his almost 20 years at The FT, what he looks for in a story, what he calls the five speeds of news. (MUSIC) We'll discuss the Moral Money newsletter, the future of ESG, all that and a whole lot more. Here now is Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson on Press Profiles. Andrew, good to see you.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Wow. I assume that "seasoned and tenured" just means (LAUGH) I'm old. I have to confirm that it's actually been more than 20 years at The FT, so I think I do count--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Wow.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

--as old.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So I was doin' my research, talkin' to a colleague of yours. And I said, "What should I know about Andrew?" And he said, "Edge can read Dante in Italian and open a bottle of champagne with a sword." Fact or fiction?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Those are both true. You only get facts from FT (LAUGH) colleagues. Come on. Did you really have to check (LAUGH) that? It's--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

All right. So not only do you have the sophisticated name, the sophisticated British accent, but you also do sophisticated things. Clearly, I need to up my game.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Do not be fooled by British double-barreled names or accents. It's all a fraud. My path into journalism was studying Italian, and then working for a champagne house. So I did pick up some unusual skills along the way.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Well, give me something unsophisticated. Make me feel better about my less than sophisticated life.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

There are far too many unsophisticated (LAUGH) things I'm interested in. We'll get into them all I'm sure as we go along.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

You've been in the U.S. now for how many years? I assume we sufficiently stripped you of all (LAUGH) of your grace at this point.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

So I first moved here in 1999 in the days when The FT was a very small team in the U.S. We had about seven people in the New York office. And it was very much the tradition that you went out for three years, and then you were reeled back into the mothership. And so that happened to me. And I had a fabulous three years, then went back to London as an editor. But I returned in 2008. And I've actually been here uninterrupted for the past 15 years in various roles.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

'99. So seven people? Anyone still left?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Outta that team, Richard Waters, who is our San Francisco Bureau Chief and runs our U.S. tech coverage and is magnificent, was New York Bureau Chief at the time. So he's one of the last men standing. But several people from that team around the network and have gone on to illustrious careers in other parts of our industry.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Was Gary Silverman there back then?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Gary Silverman was one of our first hires after-- from the kind of dot com boom period. In that early '99 period, a couple of months after I joined, we hired Gary and some now forgotten figures, like Peter Spiegel, (LAUGH) who I'm told is my boss, but did have to verify that.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

He's still hangin' around.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Allegedly. (LAUGH) Yeah.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

What's the biggest difference between the two markets in your mind?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I used to say when I first moved here everything has an extra zero after it. Every number has an extra zero. Everything is bigger in America. And that is wonderful as a journalist. It's irresistible as a financial journalist. It is the great magnetic hub for capital. I think there's another important difference though in the other direction, which is London, partly for historical reasons, has arguably a more global focus. I would say the size of the domestic market in the U.S. is so vast and so compelling, that a lot of people in our profession don't see much need to look further.

And I think one of the advantages The FT has here and around the world is that, coming from the great global entrepot that London has always been, we've always had that need to connect the dots between different markets around the globe. I love to look back at the very, very first edition of The Financial Times in 1888.

If you look at that first front page, it's all mining news from Peru, railroads in everywhere from Russia to obviously the U.S., furs being imported from (LAUGH) very exotic parts of the world. And it mattered. You know, that kind of information mattered to a bunch of traders, a bunch of investors in the London market even 135 years ago.

And I think if you look back to what our peers were doing in the same period, it was all U.S. railroads. And it was all, yeah, the emergence of the U.S. financial system, and this extraordinary domestic market. But there wasn't really much need to look further.

And I think that was one of the advantages that we spotted and the opportunities that we spotted when The FT first launched the U.S. print edition just shortly before I arrived here, 1997, 1998, and has served us very well as we've become a digital-first business model here.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Is that still a big focus, connecting the dots? So not only how does this business affect what's going on in Europe or what's happening in a specific market like Australia, but how is everything interconnected?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

That's very much our strong point. And I think we are The Financial Times, and everything we do, we try to bring it back to what the market, economic, corporate, money impact is of any given trend or any given piece of news. But we also try to bring that global perspective.

And we're extremely fortunate to have one of the most vibrant networks of what we used to call "foreign journalists." We've changed the "Foreign News Desk" name to the "World News Desk" name many, many years ago because nothing's foreign to The Financial Times.

But we have, yeah, a couple of hundred people outside the London or U.S. offices, London or New York offices, who are reporting everywhere from Turkey, to Argentina. Russia is obviously a difficult market to report from within, but we have some wonderful Russia specialists around Russia and reporting on Russia still day after day. And, obviously, on the frontlines of the conflict in Ukraine.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Let's talk about your journey a little bit. You grew up in the U.K., studied at Cambridge, received a master's in Italian and French, as you referenced earlier. What steered you into journalism? I know you began as a financial reporter at The Daily Telegraph in London. How did you make that move?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Oh, it sounds very cheesy, but when I was 11, Argentina invaded a small cluster of islands in the South Atlantic called the Falkland Islands, or known to British people as the Falkland Islands. Margaret Thatcher sent a flotilla of boats down to fight them back.

And it was pretty compelling television. I remember that Easter sitting at my grandparents' house, watching the television news and watching the backdrop of the presenter change from the Falklands crisis, the Falklands conflict, and watching the BBC presenter John Hanrahan (PH) stand on the deck of one of these aircraft carriers, counting out the jets and counting them back in again, and thinking, "This is pretty exciting, and I'd love to be a part of that."

And I've then never done anything courageous (LAUGH) or remotely like a war reporter since. But I've always been interested in stories. I've always been interested in writing and in talking to people. And as I went through my student days at (UNINTEL) High School and then college, I did a lot of student journalism, got the bug for the production of magazines and newspapers, did a little radio, and worked for the local paper when I was at university.

Just enough money to pay my bar bills. And when I was approaching my finals, I wrote off to every single U.K. newspaper I could think of, applied to The Financial Times graduate trainee scheme. Got turned down. Got turned down by the BBC, Reuters, everybody, even The Daily Express.

But I did get a week's work experience writing for the gossip column of The Daily Telegraph Business Pages. And I knew nothing about business. I'd studied no economics. I'd studied no finance. And I had a degree in French and Italian. I knew a lot.

Most of what I knew about bankers came from Dante actually and the-- whichever level of hell he cast (LAUGH) them into, the money lenders. But I realized that once I got into The Daily Telegraph city offices we called it, the Business Desk, that money was just another language.

And that you could serve an important purpose as a journalist in translating a language that many people don't really understand into plain English. And that was a challenge that interested me. And I realized that, if you break news on a financial subject, you're often saving people money or saving them from losing money. And there is a purpose to that sort of journalism that hooked me quite early on, quite apart from all of the explanatory work that you still get to do, just as you would do if you were writing about politics or war or anything else.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

What about the gossip pages? What type of gossip were you able to uncover in those early years?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

One of my first scoops, one of my first exclusives in the gossip column actually came from my delightful summer job working in the Champagne Region, where I'd reconnected with an old contact from that very happy summer, who'd come to London for an urgent meeting with the sommelier of the Savoy Hotel because the champagne they were supplying the Savoy, and they were the house champagne supplier, was going flat.

And this was a complete disaster and a terrible, terrible threat to the brand. And they discovered that what had happened was the Savoy Hotel had changed its dishwasher, or its dish-washing soap. And it was leaving a film of soap over the glasses.

And the bubbles can't rise to the surface if there's a soapy film on your glass. So I interviewed the sommelier of the Savoy Hotel, a man with a fantastic mustache called Eric Bekemon (PH), who told me that, "You must wash the glasses, and you must rinse, and you must dry with a cloth that does not bring a fluff."

And I remember coming into the news meeting as a very, very green intern basically. I think I was still unpaid at that point, and announcing that I had this story. And a very venerable columnist, a wonderful man called Christopher Files (PH), was so delighted with the story, he fell off the windowsill he'd been perched on 'cause he was laughing so much.

So, I'm not sure that was my big break, but it was a break. And I managed to parlay a week's unpaid work experience into, I don't know, six, or seven, or eight weeks of unpaid (LAUGH) working experience. So then eventually, persuaded them--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

"We're gonna keep the guy around, (UNINTEL)--"

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

--to start paying me. (LAUGH)

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That's great. I love it. I love putting the champagne experience to use.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Everything's material, you know?

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I know at The FT when you joined, one of your early successes is they had you out I guess scouring filings and doing research into different things, and uncovering some sort of notice about CEO pay.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

So this was actually earlier on. So I spent three and a half years at The Daily Telegraph before I joined The FT. And in the first few months of that time, I was the generalist in the office who could be sent anywhere to do anything. And I realized that the subject of executive pay was rising to the top of the political agenda.

New Labour was still in Opposition. Gordon Brown was the Shadow Chancellor I think at the time. And they were making a lot of noise about pay in the privatized utility companies. So electricity and water companies had been privatized in the U.K. by Margaret Thatcher.

And essentially, a bunch of executives who'd had quite low key utility jobs, earning state salaries, suddenly found themselves in the public market and being paid like public market CEOs, and quite generously. And I realized that these companies had to make the directors' contracts available to the public about a month before the annual meetings.

And this was pre-internet. It was before everything was automatically reported the way that it is now to the SEC or the moral equivalent in the U.K. And so I literally just traveled around the country, taking trains from one headquarters to another.

And I got to one of them in the Northwest of England and discovered that the part-time, two-day-a-week German was earning the shocking sum of a million pounds a year. And this was shocking enough that The Daily Telegraph decided to make this the splash. So it was my first front page lead story. And again, that was a step on the path, but it got me interested.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And so you're getting on a train. You're going to these various places. You're going in and saying, "Can I read the filing that you have"?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Yeah, you ask to see the company's secretary. And if anybody shows up at the head office, they literally have to dig out a file from the filing cabinet and let you have a read of it.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So you sit in a room and you're flipping through it?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

You sit in a room and you scribble down numbers and you do your calculations and you come back and find a phone booth in those days, and phone through the story. And I teamed up with a colleague in Parliament who got a good quote out of an opportunistic, you know, member of the Labour Front Bench, who was looking to make a point on this subject. And it became a very big story. And then I got me onto the story of executive pay, which I carried on covering for about, what is it, 29 years now, so. (LAUGH) On and off. The numbers have grown a little. As I say, everything has an extra zero.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Well, after that story, I assume you were no longer the unpaid intern. (LAUGH) You were getting compensated, that's for sure.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Yeah, I wasn't paid that much more. (LAUGH) I was given I think for a one-month contract, then a three-month contract, then a six-month contract, and then eventually put on staff.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And talk about the move to The FT. I assume growing up that must've been a target publication for you.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

My dad read The FT. There are embarrassing photos of me as a rather young boy reading The FT. I think I was more of a general reader in those days. And certainly, when I was in college, I was reading Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer. The Independent was new and seemed to-- it had wonderful foreign correspondents in its early days.

I was a big fan of that. When I was living in Italy, I'd always go into town once a week to pick up The Observer and The Independent on Sunday so I could-- which would arrive on I think a Tuesday. It would always me to get my weekly dose of U.K. news.

So The FT was certainly something I'd applied to, got rejected from. Wasn't top of my list. But when I ended up by accident as a business journalist, I came to realize quite how impressive it was. At the time, sitting in The Daily Telegraph, we had a very competitive Business Desk.

And we felt that we were landing quite a lot of punches on an FT that had become a little bit complacent, that had something of a monopoly position in London and thought that it could rely on people just picking up the phone to The FT, rather than the other way around.

And I think that was-- now that I've been on the other side of that, I think that was unfair. The same time, The FT hired quite a few of us from that team over a period of two or three years. And once I arrived at The FT, I realized the access I could get to senior people was so much greater compared to the access I'd had at The Daily Telegraph.

The combination of being willing to work hard enough to get a hold of people who are hard to get a hold of, with the number of people who do come to you just because you are The Financial Times in London in 1997 or whenever this was, was a pretty powerful combination, and almost fun. It was a great privilege.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

You had a number of different jobs at The FT. You covered media, covered technology, as we said in the U.K. and in the U.S. Fast forward to today, U.S. Business Editor. Tell us a little bit about what the job entails.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

So it's a job I created. The title's existed in the past, but never quite in this way. My previous job was U.S. News Editor. So I was running the News Desk in New York, and essentially overseeing the commissioning and editing of stories coming out of the U.S. network, and managing the homepages for the U.S. audience and the audience in this time zone.

But I would often mind myself sitting on the desk. A big piece of news would break, something like let's say the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. And I'd say, "What does business think of this?" And there was no one person who could answer that.

We'd have fantastic technology correspondents or banking correspondents, or energy correspondents, or pharma or media, et cetera, et cetera. But nobody was really trying to take that cross-sectional view of corporate America and understand what themes and preoccupations were running through every board room.

So I set this up to do a number of things. One is to be able to answer that question. What does corporate America think of X? The second piece of it was to understand, and again, this sounds rather pompous, but where's American capitalism at today?

We are living through a fascinating and extraordinary and so once in a generation debate about what the proper role of business in society and in our economy should be. And I wanted to try and capture that at a high level. And then the third piece is to try to capture the most consequential and interesting people in corporate America at this moment in history.

And so to try and set an agenda of CEO interviews, both with sector specialists who are already meeting these people, who already have those contacts, and to catch the ones who might fall through the cracks of our traditional beat structure.

Just make sure we're spending time with those people to understand what's on their minds and to introduce the most interesting figures in U.S. business to a global audience. And then the fourth part of that is I run a team of corporate reporters from New York and Chicago, covering various industry beats. And so that's the short description of it. Probably not short enough.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

No, no. Perfect. Talk to me a little bit about when you're overseeing reporters or you're working with various reporters and you're having them think about how to cover the world today and the business world as you described it, what are some of the key messages that you are constantly harping on with them to make sure that the focus is where it needs to be in your mind in terms of the overall coverage?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Well, the fact that we are a global news organization that's read everywhere from Boston, to Birmingham, to Beijing means that we have a discipline imposed on us, which is that we have to answer the question, "Does this story travel? Is there something in it that makes it relevant to a reader that is not sitting in this country, that's not working in this industry, that doesn't know the characters involved?"

You know, "Does it illuminate something broader that's going to be relevant to an executive, an investor, a policy maker, a lawyer, an accountant, all the different audiences who we reach in all the different markets that we reach?"

You're not going to tick every one of those boxes, but we are trying to spend most of our reporting time on the stories that genuinely illuminate something new and something bigger about the U.S. economy, in our case about a certain industry, about an evolution of a certain technology.

And so obviously, there's some daily breaking news that really matters, that is headline-grabbing. There's no question we're gonna jump on that. We're gonna be fast. We're gonna be responsive. But then you want to be setting the agenda for those declarative pieces that help a reader understand what the core developments are in any given beat.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I've heard you say this. You think in five speeds of news?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Yeah. And I sometimes boil it down to three. But essentially, the long-winded version, the five-speed version of this is we have breaking news and we're set up now with a breaking news team, with Fast FT, which is the live news blog that you often find on the left-hand side of the homepage, which is just 100 words of a headline, bit of explanation, bit of context.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

The wire mentality. A Bloomberg, a Dow Jones?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

We're not tryin' to be live to the millisecond. We are trying to obviously be competitive. We wanna make sure the homepage is always looking fresh and has always got the big story, that you might've seen a flash on your screen and think, "Boy, I wanna know more about that."

And you want to make sure that when you go to FT, we have obviously the big Fed announcements, the big merger announcements, the massive political events, you know, breaking news. We want to do fast, and we want to do it efficiently with a little bit of context.

But it is literally 100 words or so. Then there is what's the news of the day? Which of those stories are we going to expand to the traditional, 500-word treatment? Print world, you have the newspaper story, and it might be the online splash, quite quick, quite efficient. We're gonna call three or four people. We're gonna make sure we got all the angles of the daily breaking news. Then there's what we used to call in the print first era the Day Two Story, the overnight story.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How do you advance it?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Exactly. Something big's happened, but now we wanna maybe profile the CEO who's done this big deal. Or we want to look at the anti-trust question that's hanging over this deal that's been announced. You know, will it actually get through regulation in three different markets? That's fairly obvious. Where's this story going next?

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Or the TikTok of the deal as well?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Exactly. That's the third speed. The fourth speed is what I was just describing. What is the most interesting issue in your beat right now? And what do you wanna hit this week? What do you wanna say this week? So if you're in retail right now, back-to-school shopping season's coming up.

Let's not do five pieces on back-to-school shopping season. It ain't Christmas. But it's a moment. We're all watching what inflation is doing to U.S. consumer spending. Let's do one piece where we just take the temperature of the great American shopper today, and we give the reader something.

And we can pick our time as to when we run that. We'll probably do that this week. And any beat there's something like that. And then the fifth speed is the stuff that is hardest to do, takes longer to do, and that's everything from the really hard-to-get interview who you're gonna have to chase somebody down for weeks, maybe months.

Gonna have to make the case. You're gonna have to find the right occasion, to the big investigation, to the long form, magazine length journalism, which we've really invested in at The FT in my time here, where you do the big, declarative piece, which is the stake in the ground, your statement on a particular subject.

And those take a lot of time, lot of investment, lotta skill, lot of great editing and reporting. And what I'm always trying to tell people on my team is you want to get a nice balance between the big news in your beat, the smart piece you're gonna do this week, and the over-the-horizon piece that you want to chip away at.

You wanna fill your notebook with notes from five, six, seven different interviews as you go around, do your regular rounds, and then come out with a pitch, and then write a beautiful piece that you're gonna end up winning awards for at the end of the year.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I wanna talk to you about ESG. I know you were one of the creators of The FT newsletter focused on ESG and corporate responsibility called Moral Money, along with Gillian Tett.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Who came up with the name. I must credit her for that. And she's magnificent at framing these things.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

The most important part, coming up with the name.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Actually, it was, and it's quite telling because one of the things Gillian and I discussed when we were pitching this internally was we did not want to call this FT ESG, which might've been the obvious name for an ESG-centric FT newsletter when we launched it in mid-2019.

But both of us have seen enough rodeos to know that similar ideas have been rebranded in the past. We've had corporate social responsibility in the '90s. We've had the triple bottom line. We've had good business. We've had all these different variations on the same theme. And we suspected that ESG was having a moment in the sun, but that moment wouldn't last forever and something would come (LAUGH) along--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That's been true.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

--to replace it. Also, this theme of more responsible, sustainable, inclusive capitalism encompasses much, much more than ESG investing, per se. And ESG investing is an almost ludicrously broad topic if you think of just those three words that the acronym stands for, Environmental, Social, and Governance. That encompasses so much of what a company does, that, as many critics are now saying very vocally, it's almost meaningless.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

It is a terrific name because I think it does say so much more than just "ESG reporter."

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

It harks back to Adam Smith and the theory of moral sentiments and ideas that have been driving capitalism for as long as we've called it that.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

The swinging of the pendulum within ESG and the reaction to ESG has been really fascinating. Several years ago, corporate focus on ESG was very high. Every corporation was being asked what they were doing and how they're doing it. Every money manager was making sure they had a strategy to satisfy the current and potential future demand. Now it feels like a few years later, there's been significant pushback from several states, political pressure. It's now this controversial term. I'm curious, as someone who sits in your seat, how do you see this all playing out?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Well, I think we have a couple of tasks as journalists. One is to separate out the noise from what's actually happening. I'll get to the noise in a minute, but what's actually happening is this is an enormous amount of capital being put to work behind the idea that companies should be more responsible environmentally, socially, and in other ways, and obviously, well governed.

Companies themselves are dramatically changing their behavior compared to what they were doing five to ten years ago. They have established internal processes. They've signed up to all sorts of external agreements. They are under much, much more scrutiny now for everything they do that comes under that ESG umbrella.

And critically, the reporting structures, the SEC here, the European Union, national regulators and international bodies like the International Sustainability Standards Board, are starting to build scaffolding, a reporting framework which means that we will, as investors, as consumers, as activists, as journalists, remain focus on the underlying components of ESG for many years to come. So that's one side of it.

The other side of it is a genuinely interesting political story. I think if you told anybody five years ago that the Republican party in 2022, 2023 would make one of its key campaigning planks a sally against ESG investing, people would've been quite puzzled.

It sounds incredibly geeky. How many people really wake up in the morning in deepest Arkansas or Iowa or anywhere, worrying about ESG investing? And yet, there's been a remarkable branding process of bemoaning so-called woke capitalism, ESG investing from some very loud voices in the Republican party, also some quite mainstream voices.

We've had people like Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, Marco Rubio and others have signed their names to this campaign. It's an extrapolation of a trend that we've been covering for a few years now, which is companies being put in a political hot seat by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

And I think one of the most interesting trends I've covered in this job as Business Editor has been the realization in corporate America that, while they were always used to being beaten up by the left, they now have to get used to being beaten up by the right. And that reflects a very interesting trend. So it puts enormous pressure on companies.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

There're so many dynamics, multi-layered, constantly changing, second and third order consequences. It must be a fascinating area to cover.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

It is because it's constantly moving. I do think that the pressures on business from their customers, from their shareholders, from their employees, from other stakeholders, are such that we will continue to see business taking a greater role in our great public debates and in our environmental, social, and economic debates.

At the same time, they have no charter. Nobody elected the CEO of JP Morgan or Walmart to do this. And so it is almost inherently contested. And I think that is the great challenge now for business as they try to navigate the often conflicting demands of their different stakeholders, having set out their stool as good stakeholder capitalists. It was a lot simpler when you just had to juice the dividend next quarter.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Well, we'll continue to look and watch your coverage, continue to read Moral Money, continue to see all the things that and your team are working on as you track this moving forward. It will certainly be interesting. Should we finish off with some quick hits?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Of course.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Some quick questions. Give everyone an opportunity to learn a little bit more about you. Tell us, where is Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson spending his free times? Any notable hobbies or activities that you take part in?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I've just taken up a rather geeky new hobby, where I've discovered my grandparents' wartime letters from World War II. My maternal grandparents wrote to each other every day for four years. And so I'm currently transcribing those and slotting in pictures from the family album and tucking those all up for their last surviving daughter, my aunt.

And so that means I spend a bit of my time with my brain back in the 1940s, but it's fascinating watching actually a lot of the debates they're having about the economy, about jobs, about housing as the war is coming to an end, about the proper role of banking. These are preoccupying my grandfather when he's going through Germany in 1945--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Wow. What a treasure. That's amazing.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Yeah, absolutely.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Sounds like there could be a book in there.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I got a lot more transcribing (LAUGH) to do before I make that decision. But it's a love story, and it's a wonderful glimpse into the war as seen from the home front and the front.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Did you always have them, or did you just discover they existed?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

They were forgotten about. They were sitting in a box, and nobody had paid any attention to them. And so I only picked them about six months ago. But they've been fascinating to go through. And they're good writers.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Amazing. There you go. It's genetic, I would think. (LAUGH)

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I doubt that (?).

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Tell me about what shows do you watch? Do you gravitate towards content produced in the U.K., or have you been Americanized when it comes to streaming?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I straddle the Atlantic in my content. I try to keep up with the main shows that my friends are talking about on both sides of the Atlantic, and I fail. (LAUGH) I still haven't watched The Wire. I haven't watched Breaking Bad. I'm pretty busy.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How about Succession?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Of course, (LAUGH) I watched Succession, in real-time, like everybody else. And I think it's magnificent. My wife can't watch it. There's not a likeable character on the show. But I think, as a piece of writing, as a piece of acting, it's astonishing. And having been The FT's Media Editor in London and New York for eight years--

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Yeah, a lotta that must resonate.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

--I covered a certain number of the characters who've inspired that show, and keep in touch with a few of them still. And it is remarkably true to life.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How about a favorite restaurant? Maybe you can give us two, one in New York and one in London?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I'm quite Catholic in my tastes, so I like to move around. And I think one of the privileges of these jobs is that you get to meet so many different people in so many different places. You're constantly trying things out. You're asking people for their recommendations.

I do go back to a few places, but I'm unimaginative about my lunch choices and my local neighborhood choices. But I get a kick out of trying somewhere new actually. And I'm very, very grateful that I am in the kind of job where sometimes you get paid to eat.

We have this wonderful feature at The Financial Times that's been going for more than 25 years called Lunch with the FT, which is an interview with an interesting person over a meal. And it's a brilliant format because it's the most natural thing in the world to spend an hour and a half with somebody, two hours if the lunch is good, three if the wine is flowing, and just have that arc of where do they decide to meet? What do they decide to order? Do you go for dessert? Are you gonna have wine with that? There's a reason people are drawn to reading Lunch with the FT every weekend, because we're all drawn to having lunch with each other.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

We always ask potential employees if they've ever had a dirty job. A dirty job is something that you have to roll up your sleeves, get a little bit messy. Maybe it was in the Champagne Region. Anything come to mind?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

That's a little sordid. Early in my career at The Daily Telegraph, as again a young and dispensable reporter, I was sent out to get to the bottom of a mystery in the London financial market where a well-known fund manager had gone missing.

And his billions of dollars were up in the air. It turned out that the fund manager was associated with a lady of the night known as Sandra. And so I was dispatched to go through the telephone booths, the red telephone booths of Paddington in West London, looking for calling cards for somebody selling her services as Sandra. So I put a lot of (LAUGH) I suppose ten or 20 P coins in the slot, trying to track down insalubrious characters to get to the bottom of the story. And we did find Sandra in the end.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That qualifies. Dirty job. Do you have a favorite saying? I heard you say, "Grit in the oyster," which I love. I think that's a good one.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

That feature is part of the Moral Money newsletter (UNINTEL). And I think it's important actually as a journalist that, even when you're covering something that's booming, you should keep one eye open for what might undermine it, what might be the thing, what are the seeds of its destruction?

When I was News Editor, I would talk a lot about planning the plannable. There are some things you know are coming. There's an anniversary. There's a earnings day. There's a deadline in a deal or something. It's good to have a plan for those things 'cause so much of what happens in the news room is unplannable, and you need to leave capacity to handle the unplannable by planning the plannable.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I like planning the plannable. We should all be doing that. If an executive is gonna meet with you, they'll wanna know, "What's he like? What's his reporting style?" What should we tell them about Edge?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I think I'm open to the story and the person in the round. I'm curious about who they are and what made them, you know, who they are today. We always obviously have certain subjects that are of headline interest. And it might be a specific deal somebody's doing or a fact about the economy that they're grappling with at a given moment.

But I think I'm always curious about the individual, what they've learned, what they actually consider to be formative and meaningful in their background 'cause we see the bio for everybody. But it's not always obvious from what's in the bio, what actually has stuck with a leader over time as they've risen to a leadership role.

And I'm always curious about that. And our readers are fascinated by people in leadership roles. We're lucky to spend a lotta time with them. And it's our responsibility to try and explain what is it about these people that made them rise to the top? That's one of the things readers look to us to do.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How should PR people interact with you?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Sparingly. (LAUGH) I will tell you that I think several times a day about that statistic that there are six PR people in this country for every journalist because there're about 65 of them in my inbox (LAUGH) at any given day, some of whom I'm delighted to see.

And they're answering questions I've put to them. They are offering me time with people that FT readers want me to be spending time with, consequential individuals who are leading big, complicated global organizations, who are changing the world often.

There is an unholy amount of time wasting from members of the PR industry. Not yourself, naturally. It's a drain. Every one of those emails steals a little bit of your attention. And I'm a fairly polite person. I try to reply to people.

I reply in the hope that by saying, "This is just not one for us," people might pick up that, "Oh, maybe The FT doesn't do stories about doggy daycare." (LAUGH) But we get a lotta doggy daycare pitches. There's this wonderful expression, "spray and pray."

And people get hold of your name on an email list, and they just pepper you with time-wasting stuff. I just urge people in PR to spend a moment before pressing the button to think, "Is this really gonna end on the front page, the homepage, of The Financial Times? Is it what a global audience of people in very high level positions in finance, in business, in policy, markets, economics, et cetera, need to know today?"

And there are some things, obviously, yes. There's an awful lot that I'm afraid the answer has to be no. And so yeah. When I was Media Editor, I wrote a long piece for The FT Magazine about the rise of PR, the rise of corporate content.

And we as journalists compete with your industry, which is helping the people we write about produce their own content and go around journalists. We are intermediaries who are being disintermediated in the media by companies and other people in power creating their own media, whether it's a LinkedIn post or company blog, or the website, or whatever.

And I'm very conscious of our distinct role in that ecosystem. I think it's a challenge to us to make sure that we are always keeping our audience in mind and that we are spending our time on the the things that they want us to be explaining to them.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Excellent advice.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Said with love to all of my (UNINTEL PHRASE).

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

(LAUGH) Well, as soon as you said present company excluded, it was all good.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Naturally.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Natural. Our final question. It's our headline question. I'm sure you've come up with some good headlines during the course of your career. If someone were going to write a headline about you, what do you think that headline would say?

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

"Still Curious." I love it. I love finding out something new every day and learning it myself so I can relay it to other people. I think it's our job to stay open-minded. I never run out of things that I find interesting. There's a lot that catches my curiosity, even some of those doggy daycare emails, tragically. I think that's what I try to bring to things.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, still curious. Thank you, Andrew.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

Thank you for havin' me on. What a pleasure.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I enjoyed it. Thanks for takin' the time. Great conversation.

???????????????????????????????????ANDREW EDGECLIFFE-JOHNSON:

I enjoyed it too. Thanks.

???????????????????????????????????RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And thanks to everyone out there. Thank you so much for listening. (MUSIC) Thanks for all the great feedback we've been getting on all the episodes. So glad to hear that so many people enjoy listening to these conversations as much as I enjoy doing 'em.

And remember, you can find the full list of episodes on our website, PressProfilesPodcast.com, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever it is you listen to podcasts. We also post the transcripts on LinkedIn, so make sure to sign up for the Press Profiles Newsletter. Thanks again, and we will see ya next time.