Bucking the trend
Sir: Paul Johnson is wrong (The press, 29 September) to assert that no British news- paper matches the foreign correspondent networks of the American press. The Financial Times has 29 staff correspon- dents abroad and the number will shortly rise to 30. They are backed up by six more stringers working abroad on salaries and another 50 stringers paid a monthly retain- er. This network is still expanding, and everybody in it writes about much more than finance.
The FT bucks the British trend because it is, as far as I know, the only newspaper that deigns to bridge the culture gap between business and journalism, which is a saleable commodity, and foreign journal- ism as Fleet Street knows and loves it, which has always followed the flag and whose appeal to the British newspaper reader has slipped away with our colonies. The official life-lines have withered: today it is only commerce which is ubiquitous.
Nicholas Colchester Foreign Editor, Financial Times, Bracken House, 10 Cannon Street, London EC4
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