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Here’s a fun thought game. Close your eyes and imagine that hard-copy newspapers actually survive far into the future. Crazy, I know, but stay with me.

It’s 2098 and you’re flying to the moon for a weekend at the wildly popular eco-resort that Richard Branson’s great-grandchildren are running up there. You board the solar-powered space ferry, settle into your seat, and pull out a newspaper. What does it look like?

I keep coming up with a salmon-colored broadsheet that bears a strong resemblance to the Financial Times. Specifically it’s the FT Weekend edition that comes out on Saturday morning, packed with sharp writing about things decidedly nonfinancial, like architecture, food, art, books, and “motoring.”

Yes, the London-based FT is veddy British in certain ways. And I suppose that the same Anglomania that draws some Americans to the Economist also helps the FT in this country, where the paper has a circulation of about 150,000.

But there’s something else about the FT that has nothing to with plummy accents or tea with scones that makes it work so beautifully. And it is working, not just as a good read but as a business. Several years ago, the paper was doing so badly, shareholders of its parent company, Pearson, were agitating to sell it. Since then, as Jon Fine recently reported in BusinessWeek, “it has staged a remarkable turnaround,” with ad revenues rising steadily. While most U.S. and British newspapers are flagging, the FT “hums along enviably.”

Of course, it’s easy to praise a winner, which is what I’m doing here. But when I subscribed to the FT a few months ago, I didn’t know that it had put its financial house in order. I had casually picked up the weekend edition a few times in airports and was floored by the quality of the writing and thinking. Rather than leave it on the plane, I found myself saving it to read again at home. When was the last time you did that with a newspaper? That’s what it takes to get the skeptical modern consumer to pony up $298 for a year’s subscription.

What’s interesting about the Financial Times is that, while it is pitched at rich people (once a month there’s a glossy insert called How to Spend It) and emphatically global in outlook—judging from the ads, many FT readers apparently do nothing but jet from place to place—it doesn’t feel exclusive or superficially cosmopolitan. It feels grounded, but it’s a groundedness rooted in sensibility rather than place.

Most newspapers and magazines are insecure creatures these days. Fearful about the future, they slavishly chase the zeitgeist, riding the vapors of perceived trends and herd thinking. The FT seems to know what it’s about. It doesn’t pander and it’s never dumbed down. The paper vaguely assumes that you’re the kind of person who knows the difference between, say, Haruki Murakami (novelist) and Takashi Murakami (artist), but if you aren’t, that’s OK, too: Pull up a chair and learn. It hasn’t caught the knowingness disease.

Last weekend’s issue brought a thoughtful Christopher Caldwell column about J.K. Rowling, a trenchant books essay about Baby Boomer values, a surprising feature on the lives of Iranian women, and, on the Expat Lives page, the brazenly untopical headline, “It’s Easy to Socialize With Bulgarians.” You’ve gotta love an outfit that can run that and still turn a profit.

Blue-chip business publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal are in a fortunate position. Their core coverage of money and markets pulls in well-heeled readers who will always need that kind of information. Thus, the future looks a lot less shaky for them than it does for other papers.

But having a captive audience doesn’t guarantee that a paper will work for everyone else. The Journal and the FT compete for the same readers, which may help explain why both are consistently strong reads. It’s as if the newspaper wars that used to be so common in American cities—two or more dailies duking it out—are still alive in this one niche.

The conventional wisdom says that the brutal competition of the modern marketplace is killing newspapers. But in this instance, it’s keeping them vital. Long may it rage.