Justin Dukes brought business acumen to two of Britain’s leading media organisations. As a managing director of the Financial Times, Dukes was responsible for the paper’s first international edition, which was published in Frankfurt from 1979. Subsequently Dukes worked alongside Sir Jeremy Isaacs on the launch of Channel 4.

Dukes was appointed by Pearson, who then, as now, owned the Financial Times, with a brief to expand the business. Until it made the Frankfurt move, the FT circulated in Britain only. Given the international nature of finance and economics, it is now almost unthinkable that the FT would limit itself to a domestic audience. Equally, expansion overseas may now be thought of as the natural option for an executive with ambitions. But in the late 1970s both things were adventurous. Now the FT is published in North America and Asia, but it was thanks to Dukes that the pink paper took its first steps abroad, across the Channel.

Some journalists grumbled about the danger that the investment might pose to the quality of the UK edition and the capacity of the company to keep them happy. Dukes’s real achievement, however, was to persuade the print unions to give the project the go-ahead. At the time, the power of the printers was such that newspapers required their approval for almost any action. New ventures were often greeted with suspicion and halted by strikes.

The plan was, by the standards of the day, innovative. Articles for the Frankfurt edition were to be sent from correspondents to London where they would be incorporated with material used across all editions. A facsimile was then sent to Frankfurt — chosen for its proximity to transport links rather than because it was home to the German financial district. Printers prepared the facsimiles and the risk was that they would be unwilling to see the production of finished papers slip from the control of close colleagues. Dukes diluted their fears by sharing his business thinking with them. By emphasising that successful expansion would secure, rather than threaten, livelihoods, he won the agreement that he needed.

Dukes’s success was such that he was plucked from the FT to help to get Channel 4 off the ground. Countdown, the brain-teasing game show, was the first that viewers saw of the commercial television station when it went on air on November 2, 1982. With Sir Jeremy Isaacs as chief executive, the new channel fomented excited interest in an eclectic mixture of programming that included Brookside, the Merseyside-based soap opera; The Tube, a Friday evening pop music show hosted by Paula Yates and Jools Holland; and a dramatised reading of Tony Harrison’s poem V — which some saw as a powerful commentary on a divided Britain and which upset many others because of its expletive-laden text.

Dukes’s tasks were more mundane, but they were not without their own need for originality. Unlike the BBC and ITV, Channel 4 was founded without in-house programme makers. All its broadcasts were made by independent production companies. It was a new model, and without the benefit of precedent Dukes had to devise appropriate contractual frameworks. He ensured that the outsiders made programmes of the right quality while being paid, but not overpaid, for their efforts.

Dukes also had to juggle with Channel 4’s business relationship with ITV. Channel 4 was never fully integrated into ITV but nor, in the early days, was it entirely autonomous. Commercial necessities were meant to be separate from programming considerations but the lines of responsibility were blurred. Protagonists on both sides veered between seeing Channel 4 as a partner of ITV and a competitor. “The baby was born on a cold slab and the ITV companies didn’t know whether to stab it or feed it,” Dukes said in 1983.

In 1987, when Isaacs left Channel 4 to take charge of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Dukes hoped that he would be asked to replace him. “In any other industry he would have been a shoo-in,” an associate recalls. “But this was television and the circumstances meant that programme makers were always likely to take precedence.” Dukes lost out to Michael Grade, who came from the BBC, and subsequently went back to the corporation and then on to his current post as chairman of ITV.

Justin Paul Dukes was born in 1941. He attended school in Preston and studied engineering at Durham University. After leaving Channel 4 he took on a number of different roles. From 1988 to 1989 he was chief executive of Galileo, which ran a travel industry ticketing system. In 1991 he was part of a consortium that bid unsuccessfully for the HTV ITV franchise. He was a non-executive director of VTR, the post-production media company, from 1993 until 2006 and held a similar position at the Herald Investment Trust from 1994 until 2006.

Dukes is survived by his second wife, Jane, two daughters and three sons.

Justin Dukes, media executive, was born on September 19, 1941. He died from complications after a heart attack on October 1, 2008, aged 67