All the way back in February of this year, Michael Wolff speculated that Michael Bloomberg was considering purchasing The Financial Times. However, a spokesperson for the FT quickly shut the door on that, when he told us that the paper “is not for sale.” Then in October, more rumors about Pearson putting the salmon business paper on the block emerged. Now the New York Times is again bringing up the Bloomberg - FT connection.

Citing “three people close to Mr. Bloomberg,” the Times reports that Bloomberg — along with Reuters, which Wolff called as well — is weighing the pros and cons of buying the FT. Apparently Bloomberg has been caught appreciating the paper and its layout quite a few times, and in typical Bloomberg fashion, even joked about how he’s one of the few people who would even consider purchasing a newspaper in today’s digitally-focused world:

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Correction:

In a post last week about the potential sale of The Financial Times, FishbowlNY mistakenly described the FT as simply “pink.” As The New York Times notes, this was a gross mischaracterization.

The FT’s website insists that the paper is not just pink, it is “salmon pink.” And even if we had called it that — according to someone who works at a real, actual place called the Pantone Color Institute — we would have still been wrong. The FT, said the Pantone executive, is “bisque,” which is “a warm, welcoming, nurturing color.”

From now on FishbowlNY will refer to the FT as salmon pink; or if we’re sort of hungry, bisque. We apologize for the inaccuracy in the last post.

Anyone want to buy a pink newspaper? Because according to several rumors, The Financial Times is going to be up for sale soon. The Wall Street Journal reports that the departure of Pearson’s CEO Marjorie Scardino will bring about the paper’s sale.

The working theory is that Pearson is mostly focused on its education business, and could use the capital gained by selling off the FT (and Penguin Books) to acquire additional education-centric assets and build new products. Scardino has long been seen as the only stumbling block to a FT sale. She once she said that the paper would only be sold “over my dead body.” Something tells us a deal like that would be highly unethical.

Experts say that the FT could fetch as much as $1 billion, so who would line up to take that on? The usual suspects: Bloomberg LP, News Corporation and Reuters.

Also, anyone else who likes pink and has loads of cash. We’re looking at you, Paris Hilton.

The fact that Google+ flopped came as little surprise to anyone who has ever heard of the boutique site called Facebook. For the most part, the site remains a ghost land, with little action and a trickle of traffic. Despite this, The Financial Times has been able to be successful there, as its page recently eclipsed the one million follower mark.

According to the FT, it gathered a big audience by sticking to what it does best — covering financial news in a smart, interesting way.  ”Part of the social media team’s strategy has also been to play up to the highly visual nature of the platform and rich-media content such as videos, images and infographics,” reads a release from the FT.

That doesn’t sound groundbreaking, but it’s working. One million followers is certainly remarkable, especially considering the lack of user interaction on Google+.

Michael Wolff , writing for The Guardian, says that Bloomberg and Reuters are both competing to acquire The Financial Times. A ”senior executive” at Reuters told Wolff that FT had recently turned down an offer from Bloomberg, but it was “in clear discussions” with Reuters.

Wolff explains that gaining the paper would make sense for either company:

It is certainly true that neither Bloomberg nor Thomson Reuters need a newspaper — and yet it is true, too, that it could change the game were one of them to get a major financial news organ (so much so that each would probably do what is necessary to try to prevent the other from getting one — vastly enhancing the value of both the FT and WSJ). Indeed, while neither Pearson nor News Corp are ever going to turn the FT or WSJ into significant earners, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, with their back-end financial information resources, might be able to build a powerful and profitable financial news front end.

He does concede that because the talks are — according to his source — “at an informal level of discussion,” any deal might be far off.

UPDATE:
A Pearson spokesperson emailed us and denied the rumors. ”The FT is a very valued and valuable part of Pearson,” wrote the spokesperson. “It is not for sale.”

Francesco Guerrera will leave his position as the U.S. based Finance Editor for The Financial Times to become The Wall Street Journal’s new Money & Investing Editor.

Talking Biz News says that Guerrera will replace Ken Brown, the Journal’s current Money & Investing Editor, who is moving to Asia to bolster the paper’s Asian edition.

Yesterday we reported on MediaNews‘ trial of Steve Brill‘s JournalismOnline pay wall platform Press+, which seeks a way for writers to maybe one day get paid for Internet reporting. Today, new details have emerged about the experiment, which will launch on two of MediaNews newspaper websites — York Daily Records and the Enterprise-Record — and which VP for content development Howard Saltz has already compared to The Financial Times pay model. So which content will we be coughing it up for in the future?

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Is this the turning of the content tide? For months now we’ve been looking forward to seeing Steve Brill‘s model for regulating content with his new company JournalismOnline, which will be using a platform called Press+ to standardize pay walls for websites. We have yet to see JO work in practice, but other media companies are already jumping on the Press+ bandwagon, most recently the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the Enterprise-Record in California, which should be ready for the content provider come April or May, and be the first sites to test the new system. Both papers are owned by MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper holders in the country.

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Editor & Publisher: The Financial Times makes a number of staff appointments.

AdAge: Nielsen will combine TV and online ratings.

New York Times: Former BusinessWeek publisher McGraw-Hill today posted increased earnings for the fourth quarter.

The Business Insider: Reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos are getting color coded.

MediaPost: In search of another source of revenue, The Wall Street Journal is launching a travel agency this week.

When Rupert Murdoch began to wage his war with news aggregators like Google, media critics called it either stupid, daring, or both. But with the long-standing debate about pay walls inevitably leading to discussion about Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal site, actions speak louder than words, and the newspaper industry has begun to fall in line behind the media mogul.

The most recent example of this would be The New York Times‘ announcement last week that it would be erecting a metered pay wall for its Web site next year. Other newspapers like The Financial Times and Newsday also charge for their sites, to differing levels of success.

But there’s at least one editor who still takes issue with both Murdoch and the concept of pay walls as they stand today: British newspaper The Guardian‘s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger spoke out yesterday, slamming both the Australian media mogul and the theory behind paying for news on the Internet.

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