Did you always have financial journalism in mind as a career?

By the time I went up to Cambridge I knew I wanted to be a journalist: being paid to travel around the world and write about interesting people and places seemed a very attractive way of life. So I threw myself into student journalism and ended up editing Varsity and also co-editing Granta, which in those days was a glossy student magazine. My interest in financial journalism came a lot later, after I joined the FT. Finance is pretty central to what the paper does, and it tends to suck you in.

You studied history and economics at Cambridge and London respectively. What made you decide that economics was something you wanted to specialise in?

History was, and still is, my first love. It is a fantastic preparation for journalism, teaching you to compress complex issues into concise, clear prose. My interest in economics came later, when I was working at Reuters and then at The Financial Times. I felt that economics had become so central to political debate that I needed to understand the subject, so I took an external degree at London, studying in the evenings and at weekends. My wife (whom I met on Varsity) still bears the scars!

What keeps you at the FT?

I am still passionate about journalism: for all its many flaws, a free press is a vital part of democracy, holding the powerful to account. And I don’t know of anywhere more satisfying to practice it than the FT, which has resolutely remained a quality paper while others have moved down market, and has grown from being a UK financial paper into a global news organisation, read by the world’s movers and shakers for its coverage of politics and economics as much as finance. Nowadays two thirds of our readers are outside the UK.

Do you feel the current recession has had an impact on how financial matters are reported?

The banking crisis has certainly changed financial reporting. It has destroyed a lot of basic assumptions about the supposedly self-correcting nature of markets, and reporters and commentators are now, rightly, a lot more sceptical about the financial system and those who operate in it.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in your field?

Think very carefully before jumping in – and make sure your media skills are as flexible and as versatile as possible: the industry is in the throes of a digital revolution, undermining long established business models, and no-one can be sure where it will lead. Traditional print and broadcast journalism is still an extremely popular career choice, but the competition is ever more intense as the industry struggles with the Internet, and the philosophy that online information should be free. Much of the newspaper industry is financially troubled and shrinking.

More positively, I believe there will always be a need for skilled journalists who can make sense of a confusing world. At the FT we are lucky enough to have an online subscription business model that is working well, since our Internet readers are willing to pay for the rather specialised information we provide. And the iPad and other new tablets make digital reading such a pleasant experience that they might just be the breakthrough that transforms the industry’s outlook for the better again. Let’s hope so!