{"text":[[{"start":9.58,"text":"On January 9 1995, a gormless 25-year-old in a bad suit started work at the Financial Times. "},{"start":16.247,"text":"My preparation had been a degrading four-month training course in a dead former seaside resort, where I woke up each morning feeling dumber than the day before, but work was worse. "},{"start":25.201999999999998,"text":"The building’s windows didn’t open. "},{"start":27.207,"text":"Canteen lunch was revolting. "},{"start":29.15,"text":"When darkness fell in mid-afternoon, I realised that some adults never experienced sunlight on winter weekdays. "}],[{"start":36.16,"text":"The work seemed dull and incomprehensible, yet the two poor sods babysitting me were still bashing on their plastic keyboards at 7pm, when the newspaper “went to bed”. "},{"start":45.202,"text":"We didn’t have a website then. "}],[{"start":47.9,"text":"I trekked home that evening sensing I’d chosen the wrong employer. "},{"start":51.542,"text":"I did leave in 1998, crushed by the tedium of writing the daily currencies report, but I drifted back in 2002. "},{"start":58.759,"text":"This week is my 30th anniversary at the FT. "},{"start":61.802,"text":"To see how the paper had changed, I went to the British Library to find the edition of January 9 1995. "}],[{"start":69.03,"text":"The library printed me a reader’s card with a brand-new photo. "},{"start":72.647,"text":"The picture confirmed that I had changed beyond recognition since 1995. "},{"start":77.077,"text":"I expected the FT would have too. "},{"start":79.307,"text":"As so often in my journalistic career, I was wrong. "}],[{"start":83.03,"text":"When I fed the microfilm into the library’s machine, a newspaper popped up that looked startlingly like today’s: in its layout, the lengths of articles and the unshowy, untrendy, understated prose, written to be comprehensible to non-native English-speakers. "},{"start":96.997,"text":"Several of that day’s bylines were for colleagues still writing today. "}],[{"start":101.56,"text":"What was most spookily familiar, though, was the content. "},{"start":105.477,"text":"The front-page lead that morning was about infighting within Britain’s ruling Conservative party over Europe. "},{"start":110.70700000000001,"text":"The government was also denigrating civil servants. "}],[{"start":113.96000000000001,"text":"Another front-page story, by our Moscow bureau chief Chrystia Freeland (now potentially Canada’s next prime minister), recounted the brutal Russian invasion of Chechnya. "},{"start":123.38900000000001,"text":"In a photograph, demonstrators in Berlin held a sign saying, “Today Chechnya — tomorrow the whole north Caucasus. ”"},{"start":130.032,"text":"There was “rising east-west tension over Chechnya and Moscow’s cancellation of German-Russian military manoeuvres”, but Germany’s defence minister said: “At this precise moment it would be wrong to scale down contacts. ”"}],[{"start":141.35000000000002,"text":"There’s a saying in journalism that there are no new stories, only new reporters. "},{"start":145.967,"text":"Certainly, reading that newspaper, I had a sense of news as an eternal cycle of repetition with minor variations. "},{"start":152.32200000000003,"text":"China was “facing a looming trade war with the US over infringement of patents and copyrights”. "},{"start":157.27700000000002,"text":"Madrid had ordered a “corruption probe”. "},{"start":159.43200000000002,"text":"A French Eurosceptic was running for president. "}],[{"start":162.98000000000002,"text":"One columnist assailed what’s now called “woke” language: “Being dim, for example, is called attention deficit disorder if one is working class or mild dyslexia if middle class. ”"},{"start":172.984,"text":"Scrolling the microfilm back a few days, I saw that Labour’s leader Tony Blair wanted “to drop threat of VAT on school fees”. "},{"start":179.41400000000002,"text":"History definitely rhymes. "}],[{"start":182.16000000000003,"text":"There were occasional hints of the world of 2025. "},{"start":185.52700000000002,"text":"China was expanding currency trading “to broaden its fledgling market-style financial system”. "},{"start":190.48200000000003,"text":"And Europeans would need private pensions as they lived longer, or else “their social security systems will be beyond reform in the next century”. "}],[{"start":198.61,"text":"Entirely absent from that edition, even from the section on “Media Futures”, is the internet. "},{"start":204.02700000000002,"text":"That May, FT.com launched. "},{"start":206.70700000000002,"text":"The internet would eventually devastate countless media, but the FT now has 1.4mn paying readers, which is about four times our daily circulation in 1995. "},{"start":216.312,"text":"Unwittingly, I had joined one of the only going concerns in journalism. "},{"start":220.25400000000002,"text":"I chose the right job. "},{"start":221.859,"text":"True, that partly reflects my lack of any alternative skillset: I wasn’t going to open the batting for England. "},{"start":227.66400000000002,"text":"More than that, though, I still identify with what I see as the FT’s mission: to cover economic, financial and political power. "},{"start":235.24400000000003,"text":"We mostly write about stuff that matters. "}],[{"start":238.53000000000003,"text":"Thinking back to the two people who babysat me that first day, I no longer believe they were beaten-down wage slaves who had resigned themselves to this life. "},{"start":246.38400000000001,"text":"I think they bashed away all day because they cared about their work. "},{"start":249.72700000000003,"text":"One is still at the FT. "},{"start":251.51900000000003,"text":"The other, the exemplary Rod Oram, put in over 40 years in journalism before dying of a heart attack in New Zealand last March, aged 73, while training to cycle from Beijing to Birmingham. "}],[{"start":263.62,"text":"Had I known on January 9 1995 that I’d still be here 30 years later, I would have been horrified. "},{"start":269.912,"text":"It actually hasn’t been so bad. "}],[{"start":272.84000000000003,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram "}],[{"start":278.95000000000005,"text":""}]],"url":"https://creatives.ftmailbox.cn/album/187853-1736656475.mp3"}