Michael Ferro: the man who failed to fix journalism

US tech investor Michael Ferro had grand plans to transform newspapers for the digital age. But with the sale of the Los Angeles Times he seems to be retreating from those ambitions. Jane Lewis reports.

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FERRO TRIBUNE
(Image credit:  2016 Bloomberg Finance LP)

"What exactly does Michael Ferro want out of the news industry?" asks Sam Stecklow in the Chicago Reader. "It's a fair question for the man who controls [the US's] third-largest newspaper publishing company." Ferro, a 51-year-old tech entrepreneur, has acquired a string of high-profile titles, yet he "has never seemed particularly enamoured of any of the newspapers he's invested in".

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.