FT Weekend: Poet Maria Stepanova. Plus, Inside the FT newsroom
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, guest host Marc Filippino discusses the FT's war coverage in Ukraine with our Editor, Roula Khalaf. How does a news organisation make decisions during wartime? Then Marc talks with Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize last year. Maria tells us why so many intellectuals are leaving Russia and what it’s like to be Russian and against the war.
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Special offers for Weekend listeners, from 50% off a digital subscription to a $1/£1/€1 trial are here: http://ft.com/weekendpodcast
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Want to say hi? We love hearing from you. Email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. We’re on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.
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The first US FT Weekend Festival is on Saturday, May 7 in Washington, DC. To attend virtually or in person, buy tickets at http://ft.weekendfestival.com – use the discount code FTFriends2022 for 10% off.
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Links and mentions from the episode:
–Key coverage of the war in Ukraine is free to read: https://www.ft.com/content/77ab8dcf-cb02-4e57-aff0-85c8a84f5a1f
-In late March the FT published an exchange on NATO’s red lines between our Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolf and Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator Gideon Rachman: https://www.ft.com/content/7640ea89-cc1f-4e41-a64f-95e88de19454
–Maria Stepanova, ‘The War of Putin’s Imagination’: https://www.ft.com/content/c2797437-5d3f-466a-bc63-2a1725aa57a5
–Maria’s International Booker Prize shortlisted novel is called ‘In Memory of Memory.’ Here’s a quick review we ran when it first appeared in English: https://www.ft.com/content/bad0513d-f67c-4e0e-9b2d-962040fa6422
–This weekend’s FT Magazine cover story, ‘21 days in Ukraine: a diary’: https://www.ft.com/content/391232c8-b05c-480f-a189-4e9e21d1bd4a#comments-anchor
–You can also keep up with FT coverage by following @financialtimes on Instagram and Twitter.
–Marc Fillipino is on Twitter at @mfilippino and hosts the FT News Briefing. You can listen at the following link, or by searching for ‘FT News Briefing’ wherever you get your podcasts: https://www.ft.com/ft-news-briefing
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Garrett Tiedemann.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner. |
| 0:06.2 | Learn more at equinole.co.uk |
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| 0:32.0 | When Russia's war on Ukraine started at 5 a.m. Moscow time on Thursday, February 24th, the FT's editor-in-chief Rula Halaf was on vacation. |
| 0:42.0 | For months, Putin had been amassing troops along Ukraine's border, though he was also saying that they weren't intended for Ukraine. |
| 0:51.0 | And as the head of the financial times, Rula and her team were ready, all of them. |
| 0:56.0 | The editors, the journalists on the ground, they had been thinking about how to plan for a war that wasn't supposed to start, but could arrive at any moment. |
| 1:05.0 | I remember very clearly it was on Christmas Eve that we had our first meeting on Ukraine. |
| 1:13.0 | We had literally Christmas Eve, I called various editors, we had a hangout, and we started planning for what may come. |
| 1:22.0 | And I had been at the Munich Security Conference just a few days before the war, and I had had a lot of briefings about how intelligence agencies expected the war to unfold. |
| 1:35.0 | So on Wednesday, I was mentally prepared, and I was actually away on holiday. |
| 1:43.0 | So I watched CNN for hours and hours, and feeling very frustrated that I'm not actually in London and in the newsroom at that time. |
| 1:54.0 | But we weren't really, by that time, we weren't actually surprised, we were expecting it. |
| 2:02.0 | Hey there, I'm Mark Filipino, I'm filling in for Lila today. |
| 2:07.0 | Normally, I host the Daily News podcast at the FT, it's called the FT News Briefing. |
| 2:12.0 | If you haven't already, you should check it out. |
| 2:15.0 | On the news briefing, and just about everywhere else at the FT, Ukraine has dominated our coverage over the past few weeks, and Rula plays a primary role in shaping that coverage. |
| 2:27.0 | She's led the FT since January 2020. She started about two months before the pandemic hit the Western world, so she's basically never had a slow news day as editor. |
| 2:38.0 | And now, she says, we're covering the most important news event of our lives. |
| 2:43.0 | Because we have lived in a world where we assumed that this type of war in the heart of Europe would not take place ever again. |
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