Pearson Plc said Wednesday  it wouldn’t rule out a sale of the Financial Times as Chief Financial Officer Robin Freestone told investors that the company may eventually re-examine its ownership of the newspaper.

Amy Thomson and Kristen Schweizer of Bloomberg News report, “‘We look at the ownership of that and say, ‘Are we the best owners for it?’’ Freestone said at a conference in Barcelona organized by Morgan Stanley. ‘So far the answer is yes. That could change.’

“Pearson is emphasizing its education business as new Chief Executive Officer John Fallon prepares to take the reins from Marjorie Scardino, who retires in January. The company has decided to consider offers for the iconic pink financial newspaper this year, people with knowledge of the situation told Bloomberg News this month. Pearson had denied that the FT is for sale.

“Pearson may also ultimately re-evaluate its minority holding in a venture being set up with Bertelsmann SE to combine the German media company’s Random House with London-based Pearson’s Penguin publisher, Freestone said.”

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Louise Armitstead of The Telegraph in London writes that an analyst that follows Pearson Plc, the parent of The Financial Times, has written a scathing report accusing it of unnecessarily increasing the cover price of the paper and that the FT is not worth as much as what has been reported.

Armitstead writes, “The analyst said that Pearson was likely to sell FT Group to focus on its education business but claimed the newspaper is worth just £150m. With its 50pc stake in The Economist magazine, FT Group could fetch £600m to £700m, even with the so-called ‘trophy asset’, Mr Braley said.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon takes a look at the operations of The Financial Times in the wake of reports that it is for sale.

Salmon writes, “Pearson loves to repeat that ‘the FT is a valued and valuable part’ of the company, but there’s a good reason why public, listed companies tend not to own things like sports teams or works of art. For that matter, Pearson is one of very, very few public companies which own newspapers and which don’t have a dual-class share structure giving control of the company to some mogul or family. The buyers might not be doing DCF math, but the sellers do it all the time, and the value of $1 billion to Pearson is vastly greater than the present value of the FT’s future cashflows would ever be.

“The new owner, of course, will want to get $1 billion of value out of his investment, but he won’t be trying to get there by using the FT’s current playbook of constantly raising subscription rates. That, along with its paywall paranoia — the determination with which it attempts to prevent non-subscribers from reading all but the tiniest amount of FT content — means that it is actively repelling the population which is its best chance at future growth and relevance.

“The FT loves to tell advertisers that it reaches lots of very rich and important high-level executives, which is true. Newspapers sell readers to advertisers, and those executives are where the money is right now. But they’re not where the money will be, in say a decade’s time. When Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ, I expected him to turn it into a formidable global brand, especially in China; instead, he invested millions in a new section devoted to New York City. It turns out that Murdoch’s desire to compete with and beat the NYT is greater than his desire to invest in an ultra-long-term project which would probably only pay off after he was dead.

“But there are two huge global news companies which are desperate to make inroads in China and other fast-growing countries: they have an enormous strategic interest in reaching the next generation of global technocrats, and they know they can’t do that with terminals alone. They need something which can travel more easily, something with a first-rate reputation: a foot in the door, if you will. To Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, the value of the FT is not in its profitability, but rather in its reach and its reputation. It’s one of the very few possible ways of reaching the people who will be running the world in 10 or 20 or 30 years’ time — no matter what country they currently live in.”

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Douglas McIntyre of 24/7WallSt.com writes about the importance of The Financial Times in business news coverage.

McIntyre writes, “Some hope emerged in 2011 and 2012 that the extreme drag that the economy had put on print media company results had lessened considerably. That would give the same companies a longer time to make their moves from print to digital content. But two things have happened. The pace of digital revenue growth has been inadequate, as the quarterly results of The New York Times Co. and other public newspaper firms has shown. And, worse, the slide in the overall economy has undercut any recovery of the sales for these companies.

“The solutions to the revenue problem for companies like The Financial Times are easy to identify, but almost impossible to implement. One plan already adopted by some media is to cut print editions to fewer days and force readers to rely on Internet versions of the same media. But the FT probably still makes money on its paper version, particularly with the large sum it can charge subscribers. The second solution is to drive more people to Internet editions by charging low subscription rates. This is a violation of one of the main rules business school students learn. It is not possible to make a profits while losing money on every customer, no matter how quickly that customer base grows.

Digital versions of papers carry advertising whether or not their parents charge for access to content. Clearly that combination has not been enough to press the FT’s revenue higher quickly. The lesson cannot be lost on media that include Fortune, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and a number of other, smaller media that operate in their shadows.

The business and financial press are in for real trouble.

The Financial Times has imposed a recruitment freeze and a ban on all but the most essential travel, to control costs in a tough advertising market.

Mark Sweney of The Guardian in London writes, “John Ridding, the Financial Times chief executive, outlined the measures in an internal email on Tuesday to the newspaper’s senior management group titled ‘Cost control/profit protection’, seen by MediaGuardian.

“The measures, which apply to all staff, include a freeze on recruitment and stricter rules on travel expenses.

“‘Unless there is a clear commercial opportunity that will deliver this year, or an essential editorial trip, we should let our global network do the work (that is what it is there for),’ said Ridding. ‘Only the most vital of journeys will be approved.’

“He said that board members will also be focused on finding revenues and saving costs so staff should not take up their time with non-essential and non-urgent requests.”

Read more here.

Most Financial Times readers are now digital subscribers, after another spurt in online subs pushed the publisher to 313,000 digital subscribers this September, reports Robert Andrews of paidcontent.org.

Andrews writes, “The 17 percent annual subs jump means FT Group has a combined print and digital circulation of over 600,000, its owner Pearson reported in a nine-month interim earnings update on Monday.

“When the FT first started combining print and digital circulation in June 2010, it was 563,026.

“FT Group revenue has grown seven percent over the last year. Pearson reported: ‘Advertising remains weak.’ That observation has long under-pinned The Financial Times’ preference for paid content income.

“For comparison, New York Times paid digital subscriptions, introduced in March 2011, grew 11 percent last quarter alone to hit 592,000.”

Read more here.