Semafor’s new “CEO editor”, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, has said he left a top job at the Financial Times for the start-up because it looked like a chance to tell “a brilliant story”.
Beginning on Tuesday (today), former FT US news editor Edgecliffe-Johnson is running a Semafor “multiplatform membership” product called The CEO Signal, which the publisher said is for chief executives at companies making at least $500m a year.
The main feature of the product will be a weekly newsletter, but Semafor promises it will grow to include events and audio and video products.
In common with other Semafor products, The CEO Signal is free for its audience, instead generating revenue for the company by attracting influential or wealthy audiences and monetising their attention via sponsorship. (The sponsor as of the first edition of the newsletter, out today, is professional services giant PWC.)
Edgecliffe-Johnson said Semafor “has already got a pretty impressive C-suite audience,” claiming that among the 800,000 subscribers to all its newsletters, roughly 25% are in C-suite positions.
While Edgecliffe-Johnson said he didn’t have any numbers to share on how many chief executives Semafor has on its distribution list, he said: “I can tell you it’s going very well”.
“The reception of this has been extremely heartening, and I think has confirmed my suspicion that there’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart — who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time, and finding that the media coverage ostensibly targeted at them isn’t quite doing what it says.”
In the media world, The CEO Signal’s $500m target membership would include chief executives like Robert Thomson of News Corp, The New York Times’ Meredith Kopit Levien and the Financial Times’ John Ridding, but it would exclude The Economist’s Lara Boro and The Guardian’s Anna Bateson. (You can apply to receive The CEO Signal here, if you fancy your chances.)
“The people inside this velvet rope are not the wannabes,” Edgecliffe-Johnson said. “They’re not the people aspiring to the C-suite, they’re not the people dreaming of one day maybe reaching the corner office. They’re the people who are there.
“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does. It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.
“What I found from my conversations with CEOs since announcing this… is that there’s a real sense that they’re scanning the horizon for insights from their peers. But there’s nowhere that’s really trying to collect that. There’s a reason people go to Davos.
“They don’t have to — they have access to all sorts of information, they can collate it. But just the ability to talk to people living parallel lives to their own, to their genuine peers, and to soak up those insights is a massive part of the CEO’s mandate and need for information.”
But he added: “I’m not here to just flatter and comfort a lot of already powerful people. I’m here to give them something distinctive and something valuable.”
Each CEO Signal newsletter will begin with Edgecliffe-Johnson’s take on the big theme of the week, followed by an interview with a chief executive, a round-up of notable new data or research and more light-hearted references to “which CEOs had a good week and which CEOs had a bad week”.
The interviews will be published, after a delay, outside of the newsletter, but otherwise the content will be exclusive to subscribers. The first newsletter, running on Tuesday to coincide with the 2025 World Economic Forum at Davos, carries an interview with Cisco Systems chief executive Chuck Robbins.
“Essentially, these are busy people — this will be tightly-packaged, it’ll get straight to the point and it’s going to keep that focus on what is actually useful, what’s actually valuable for somebody in one of these positions.”
Edgecliffe-Johnson: There is a sense ‘that in our profession, you can’t afford to stay still’
Edgecliffe-Johnson spent nearly three decades at the Financial Times. Explaining his decision to move to Semafor he said: “I think as a journalist, you want two things: you want a story you really care about, that genuinely interests you, and you want real clarity about the audience you’re writing for.”
Semafor’s “proven ability to actually pull this kind of thing off” also helped persuade Edgecliffe-Johnson to leave the FT, he said, as well as “a broader sense that in our profession, you can’t afford to stay still — and if you’re not innovating, you’re making a mistake”.
More broadly, he said that recently, “what I just found with my own media consumption habits was I was seeking out more and more content of direct relevance to me.
“I was spending more of my time reading the media that came to me through my inbox and a little less time — were it not for the day job — going out and opening apps or visiting home pages than I was a few years ago.
“I think there’s something about building a sense of community through a newsletter, through events — which I learned a fair amount about through helping to launch the Moral Money newsletter at the FT, which was focused on sustainable business and green finance and other issues like this.
“But you just see, as a journalist when you’re part of that, the spark it creates with an audience — which is much more valuable, I think, and meaningful, than the old detached ‘voice of God’.”
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