Luxury Media in the Cost of Living Crisis

Also: I open an office, and immediate flee to Italy

A few months ago I abandoned my long-held Saturday Guardian/Observer habit, in favour of the Financial Times Weekend. This was not a decision I arrived at lightly, but one born of a number of changes on the end of both myself and the newspapers.

The Saturday Guardian was, in my opinion, the best newspaper in Britain for a long time. But cost-cutting measures over the past couple of years have led to a slimmer paper, with more of the juicy weekend content spread out to the Observer (for non-UK readers, the Observer is the editorially independent Sunday edition of the Guardian). And at £3.50 a pop, £7 combined, these two weekend editions are basically equivalent to buying a nice paperback or 5 minutes of heating. The nail in the coffin of my weekend Guardian habit was the end of The Guide, the little A5 magazine that ran you through the week’s cultural highlights (including, on rare occasions, my own work).

I am now an FT Weekend man, buying that newspaper on Saturday morning and then luxuriating in the process of spreading it out over the weekend. The Weekend magazine is, for my money, the best newspaper supplement in the UK; and Life & Arts is also one of the best broadsheet pullouts.

There is, however, one part of the FT Weekend that I have never quite understood the appeal of, which is the supplement formally known as How To Spend It.

The idea, with How To Spend It, is quite simple. Readers of the Financial Times are likely to have a considerably higher than average income and therefore a significant amount of disposable income. How To Spend It is a guide to disposing of that income, not via philanthropy or other altruistic aims (like acquiring Substack subscriptions or investing in a lucrative podcast company) but through the acquisition of various luxury goods. In short, it is a hybrid of high-end ladies fashion magazines and the more masculine focused pages of GQ, Vanity Fair or the SkyMall magazines on airplane flights.

Last week, however, How To Spend It rebranded itself. How To Spend It is an essentially euphemistic name, the ‘it’ pertaining to an unspecified but large amount of money. A more accurate title would always have been something like: How To Spend Your Post-Tax Income If You Are A Lawyer Or Work In The City And Do Not Have Any Discernible Taste Of Your Own. But that’s a bit wordy. Instead, the idea was to create a product that had the authority of an instructional manual, combined with the content of a long series of advertorials.