FT News Briefing - Podcast Rankings and reviews

A digestible and informative podcast on the British and European perspectives on business and political news that you can’t easily find from my American home. Thank you Marc and the fine staff of contributors and keep up the good work.

Used to be a fantastic show I couldn’t miss having most mornings. Lately, it’s less about FINANCIAL news (hence name Financial Times) and all about war and global conflict. Not even about how war impacts business or finance but just generally about war. The FT has longer form weekend shows that are better suited for that kind of information. I come here for information about the markers and how they impact my job as an M&A lawyer and potential investments in my personal life. The FT doesn’t seem to be doing that anymore.

They used to be the first to report a lot of financial news, and I gained a lot of insights from them. Now they seem to be behind the curve and report about things after everyone else already has or at the earliest at the same time as everyone else.

The old hosts don’t ever seem to be on here, and they really made the show. I don’t enjoy the new hosts as much. I’m not some older stuck in my ways person either. I’m in my late 20’s and welcome change when the change is positive. These changes are not positive in my experience.

It’s a shame. I used to recommend this show to so many people and listen almost every morning but now I can go a week or more without listening and not miss it. Then when I do listen I’m disappointed. They need to go back to how things were and get either the old hosts back or good, consistent hosts and focus more on financial news rather than other types of news which we could hear anywhere else. I miss the old show.

I believe this podcast has the potential to live up the FT’s reputation for excellence but the lack of consistency in audio quality drags it down. Guest speakers often come across as muffled or unintelligible, which largely erases their contribution to the show.

Additionally, in my personal opinion, I believe the staff need more voice training if they are going to represent the FT in an audio program. Mark Filipino does a good job but his cohosts are lackluster at best.

Lastly, I think that the FT should offer an ad-free version of its programs for subscribers. I find it a bit irksome that I pay a premium subscription to the paper and am still subjected to ads on their audio content. I think the programs would benefit if the FT adopted a model similar to The Economist for its podcasts.

Swamp Notes would be better off as its own podcast, essentially a US Political Fix, rather than be nested in News Briefing.

News Briefing is ephemeral and daily. If you miss a day you likely won’t go back and will just pick up tomorrow. Swamp Notes, being weekly, one might not listen to on the exact day it came out.

The way one can organize podcasts to auto-delete to reduce clutter makes this somewhat incompatible and it would be solved by simply not being a podcast-within-a-podcast.