This month we’re talking to Geordie Clarke, Deputy Editor and News Editor at the FT: Money Management magazine, the must-read news source for professional independent advisors.

1. Describe your typical working day?

Most of the time my typical day involves working on features for the monthly print edition and handling anything we publish online. I start my day by checking my emails first – mostly to make sure I haven’t been sacked – then I read the daily news headlines and catch up with the chatter on Twitter.

From there I do everything else that needs to be done and, if I’m lucky, I’ll have a lunch meeting with a contact. This is a much rarer occurrence in my daily routine than you might imagine.

2. How important is social media in sourcing stories?

I don’t know if it’s as important for sourcing stories as many people think it is (or if it is, I’m definitely doing it wrong), but it has an important role to play in terms of making new contacts and connections. I can say for certain that I have been able to reach more people in personal finance and wine, the other world in which I write.

The scope for sourcing stories has become a lot wider simply because I post a lot of nonsense to Twitter. This has taught me a valuable lesson: My grade seven homeroom teacher was totally wrong; goofing around really does pay off in the end.

3. What would catch your eye in a PR pitch?

Cats dressed up as pirates. Or anything to do with waffles. Failing that, what catches my eye is something that targets my market and readership specifically and offers more than the same old mundane commentary that hits my inbox every hour.

It’s always good to be offered a different angle on a story or an exclusive interview that allows me to publish something my competitors don’t have. If that’s not possible, you better have a lot of good cat photos to appease me.

4. What’s the best tech story you’ve ever read?

Okay, this isn’t really a story as such and it isn’t finance-related. It’s also going to make people think I’m older than I really am (or just groan because it’s boring by today’s standards). When the first Macintosh computers came out in 1984 with a graphical interface, my mind was blown forever. Yet we used MS-DOS in my household until 1996. Yes, 1996.

5. What’s the next big news in finance tech?

If it has anything to do with wealth managers being replaced by software that is superior at handling people’s financial planning needs (and therefore eliminating my audience), I’m spiking it.