This year is a milestone for the FT. We are marking 125 years as a leading global news source known for accurate, quality journalism. As part of our celebrations, the FT hot air balloon flies over New York on May 1. 

Ian Hamilton Fazey (1980-2000)

When Mrs Thatcher travelled around the UK, she viewed us all from a secure
bubble protected by police, aides and her PR troupe, led by her formidable
press secretary Bernard Ingham. Bernard had little time for scribes like
me, who wanted to ask serious questions; he only wanted TV clips and
soundbites. The only hope was to catch her away from the media pack and
hope for a word.
Early in December 1988 the opening of Asda’s new HQ in Leeds was the
usual PR circus, with the PM praising Asda as an exemplar of UK enterprise
and accepting a white teddy bear called Snowflake to put under the Downing Street Christmas tree. Asda put one in every press pack.
The FT wanted her comment on the closure of the last shipyard in
Sunderland, due to be announced in the Commons that afternoon at 3.30pm. I
stalked her motorcade until the TV crews and other reporters fell away and
found myself alone in the car park of York Trailers in Northallerton,
North Yorkshire, waiting for her arrival from lunch with party activists
at 2.30.
An aide came over. I was invited to tour the factory with Mrs T,
provided I asked no questions until she was ready to speak to me. After
nearly an hour we emerged into the car park. “So, Mr Fazey, what can I do
for you?” she inquired.
As I mentioned the name of Sunderland, she interrupted, suggesting I
wrote instead about the great British success stories she had seen that
day. And she couldn’t comment about Sunderland ahead of the announcement to the Commons that afternoon. “But that’s in less than 30 seconds from now,” I protested, looking at my watch. ”Precisely!” she exclaimed, as Bernard’s arm shepherded her into her car. The convoy glided off into the gathering winter darkness in a flurry of tail-lights.  I rang the newsdesk on my carphone to report being bested and picked up the white teddy bear. There was a little label protruding from a seam. It said: MADE IN CHINA. We mentioned this foreign interloper next day in Men & Matters, as the diary column was still called in those days. Snowflake never appeared under the Downing Street Christmas tree.

 Scheherazade Daneshkhu (correspondent 1990-present)

As leisure industries correspondent, I covered the battle for the licence to run Britain’s National Lottery for a second term. Richard Branson, the UK’s buccaneering Virgin Group entrepreneur [featured in FT ad above], was desperate to win the licence, even co-opting Desert Orchid, the famous white racehorse, as a publicity stunt for his failed first bid. 
On Sunday December 17 2000 - two days before the official announcement - a Sunday paper said incumbent Camelot was “poised” - a word much beloved of journalists - to win. My front page story the next day said definitively that Camelot would win and a piece inside on why the Branson bid failed, was headed “Lottery loser”. I arrived at the office early that Monday morning to hear my phone ringing off the hook. At the end was a spluttering voice, inarticulate in its fury. It was Branson demanding my sources. He believed the FT story and not the Sunday paper – which was why he was calling in person instead of getting a flak to do it. He seemed convinced that the FT was affiliated with the establishment, which had formed a plot against him. There was no conspiracy, but it was not the only time he would cry foul of the system, as he did to great effect with the west coast rail franchise debacle last year.

Andrew Bolger (joined the FT in 1986)

Stories  for the FT’s pioneering international edition launched in 1979 were  faxed to Frankfurt, where they were  set in type and printed. But there were
variations in  the speed with which  journalists grasped the new
technology. One executive, who went on to scale dizzy heights in the
company, tried to have a sealed envelope faxed to Germany. Asked what
he was playing at, the executive explained he had put the letter into
an envelope because its contents were confidential….

Lina Saigol recalls this April Fool’s gem, courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes:

On March 30, 1998 the Guinness brewery issued a press release announcing that it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England to be the official beer sponsor of the Observatory’s millennium celebration. 

According to this agreement, Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time until the end of 1999. In addition, the famous observatory would refer to seconds as “pint drips.” 

The Financial Times, not realizing that the release was a joke, broke the news in an article in which it discussed how some companies were exploiting the millennium excitement in order to promote their own brand names. It declared that Guinness, with its Greenwich tie-in, was setting a “brash tone for the millennium.” 

When the Financial Times learned that it had fallen for a joke, it printed a curt retraction, stating that the news it had disclosed “was apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof”.

Rivka Nachoma (FT since 1979, now US assistant managing editor)

When I started as a research librarian at the FT almost 34 years ago, our New York bureau consisted of three reporters, an office manager, and me.  Almost no one knew of the FT, with the exception of a handful of senior Wall Street executives and federal government officials.  It was quite an emotional moment when two decades later, in 2000, with our FT editorial office now more than 50 strong, I stood  on the sidewalk and watched a huge FT sign being hoisted on to the top of our new office building at 1330 Avenue of the Americas. By then we had close to 100,000 subscribers in the US. Dan Aykroyd, starring in FT.com television commercials at the time, rolled up astride a pink Harley-Davidson.