A primate without valid ID has been spotted loitering in the “plaza” in front of our London headquarters, the modernist tower that The Economist inhabits in the heart of the “clubland” of St James’s Street.

My colleague Tom Standage immediately snapped photos and shared them on Facebook. The individual was reading The Economist, then switched to CFO, also owned by The Economist Group.

Suggestions that the individual is in fact an American expatriate in London, formerly in the business of collateralized debt obligations, have not been corroborated.

After several days of his vigil, the writers passing by every day are now beginning to accept his presence. Our science correspondents consider him family, and believe that he fled a hostile environment in America to be among people who are sympathetic.

Will he go? Will he stay? Will he edit?

Tom Standage

Tom Standage, a friend and colleague at The Economist, has finally migrated to WordPress and started regular blogging. Check in on him regularly. His first five books are a great read and I can’t wait for his sixth, which is on food, but with a historical angle not unlike the one I’m using in my book.

Tom edits the Business Section AND the Tech Quarterly, so you’ll also enjoy his musings on topics such as whether Apple will come out with an eBook Reader this year that might kill Amazon’s Kindle. As it happens, I am testing a Kindle right now. I’ll tell you anon how I think it will affect the future of reading….

(At the bottom of this post you get to vote whether we should have bylines. But just to be clear: this is meant as a bit of good fun. Nobody, as far as I know, is actually considering changing the policy.)

Orville Schell

First, just a few examples of the way that this topic comes up. A couple of years ago, I introduced our editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, and Orville Schell, then dean of Berkeley’s journalism school (where I was lecturing) for this conversation. (You can see Berkeley’s chancellor introduce me, then me introduce John and Orville, and then John and Orville chatting.)

At about minute 24 Orville gets the inevitable question from the audience. Why no bylines? And, Orville teases John, “I understand that there is a good bit of grousing” about it among the journalists. “They feel they don’t exist in a certain sense.”

John gives what I think is the best answer: “We haven’t done anything. We’ve kept the same, and everyone else has changed.” In other words, The Economist is 160+ years old, and back then anonymity was the norm. Then the industry went on a slightly disturbing path toward writer celebrity, and we simply chose not to participate.

But, John goes on, it is more than mere inertia: “Why do we keep it? Firstly, because it’s, I suppose, a brand. But it’s more than a marketing gimmick.” It also, he says, fits our method of collaborative writing. (This, I must say, strikes me as the weaker part of the answer, because most of my writing in the past eleven years has in fact been very individual, very “authorial”, and barely edited. And journalists at other magazines and newspapers also occasionally collaborate in their writing, despite having bylines.)

Orville and John then kid around, using, ahem, me as the guinea pig for their humor.

Another view is this one by Brad DeLong, an economist also at Berkeley. Greg Ip, a blogger and writer for the Wall Street Journal, had just quit both his blog and the Journal (and thus his personal brand) to join us at The Economist in chaste anonymity: “How could Greg Ip leave the WSJ for The Economist? I mean, he’s a brand – and the Economist doesn’t do brands, except its own. (And that it does exceedingly well.)” His commenters then vent on what they think about our policy.

Bill Emmott

Yet another instance: Here Bill Emmott, John’s predecessor as editor (and the man who hired me), tells an interviewer that

Journalists are egomaniacs and protective about their own territory and their own work, and not having bylines mitigates against that somewhat. With bylines, you worry more about your own story. With no bylines, you worry more about the whole paper because your reputation depends on the reputation of the whole paper.

So I thought I might chip in.

What our policy is (and is not)

First, our vaunted anonymity has never been absolute. Yes, the vast majority of articles in The Economist have no byline. But there are exceptions.

1) Special Reports

Formerly called “Surveys”, to the confusion of our American readers (who think that the word means questionnaire), these are huge essays of about 13,000 words around a specific topic, such as a country or an industry. In effect, they are small books. Whereas most other newspapers and magazines throw a team of reporters on these kinds of special sections, The Economist gives each report to one author. This is a great idea. That way, you get coherent, well-structured and individualistic reporting in great depth.

One thing that annoys me is that most readers don’t realize this. They think that the chapters in a Special Report are written by different people. And we don’t really help them with our layout. But we do hide a byline in each Special Report. Not doing so would simply be too cruel. A Special Report is its author’s baby.

So the author’s name shows up in what we call the “rubric” of the opening chapter. It looks like this:

2) The World in 200x.

Another exception concerns our sister publication, The World In [Year]. It’s an annual magazine, and the new one, The World in 2009, just came out. Here is my piece in it. As you see, it has my name at the top and at the bottom.

3) Podcasts and video

This is an interesting category of exceptions, because it is new. We have had audio interviews with the authors of Special Reports for a while, but in 2006, when I wrote this Special Report about the new media, we fittingly experimented with podcasts. Somewhat to our surprise, they became hugely popular, hitting the iTunes charts with almost no effort on our part.

The thing about audio and video, of course, is that these media are extremely intimate and extremely personal. There is absolutely nothing anonymous about them. You hear the author’s “voice,” literally. This did not go unnoted at the time. The door of anonymity was opened ajar by another inch.

4) Reader letters

When you send a letter to the editor, it gets forwarded to the author of the article in question. And I have, I believe, answered every single letter by email for the past eleven years. Like many of my colleagues, I sign my replies, so anybody who wishes to know who wrote a particular piece can simply write a letter and wait.

Ironically, the new-media revolution has had a contrary effect on these exchanges. A while ago we started allowing people to comment on our web site directly underneath our stories. There are still a lot of letters to the editor, but a lot of this traffic now seems to get diverted to the comments sections. And I do not bother to answer those.

5) Extracurricular activities

As correspondents, we have always moderated panels at conferences and such. Each time we do, we are introduced by name and affiliation, and then the audience hears us talk. So they meet us.

Nowadays, several of us have also started personal blogs. Mine is the most recent example. Edward Lucas has for years had his blog about Eastern Europe and his book. Gideon Lichfield wrote a blog about Israel and Palestine while he was posted in the Middle East. Tom Standage has his site, as do all of us who write books.

My views

I won’t tell you. But I will say this: When I joined The Economist in 1997, I loved the anonymity. I had no name, no personal brand, and I felt that from my first day my articles had the same chance of being on the cover as anybody else’s. I expend as much effort on a tiny “box” as on a huge Special Report.

Admittedly, during the past eleven years, there have been moments when I wished that my cumulative work might have given me a personal brand. Writers at the New Yorker eventually become known as writers. We don’t. Writing a book is one way out of that dilemma. That is not why I’m writing a book. Nonetheless, it is quite remarkable how many of us do.

The view that counts

Ultimately, what the writers think ought not to be the decisive criterion. Duh. It is the readers who matter. But this is where it gets really interesting. Anecdotally, I have found that most readers tell me that they would prefer to know the writer’s name. But I wonder whether they actually do. It is also possible that something might get lost along the way. Something je-ne-sais-quoi. There is only one way of finding out, but the problem is that this experiment would be hard to reverse. So, what do readers actually want?

The poll

Time for you to vote:

The “pros”:

On one side, there is an army of tech-savvy, media-savvy, modern, sophisticated, worldly people who say to me: Blog! Bloooog! For book authors, obscurity is the enemy, not piracy, theft or plagiarism. So blog, build a community, learn from that community, and then let the community help you when the time comes to launch.

One person whose example sticks out in my mind, as I’ve mentioned before, is Chris Anderson. His first book, The Long Tail, began as an article in Wired (of which Chris is the editor), then became a book-deal, then a blog, and then, well, the book.

I ran into Chris the other day and asked him if he had any regrets at all, and Chris said Nope, blogging about the book has been entirely for the better. He’s actually learned a lot from his blog’s audience (“crowdsourcing” is the fancy new term for that), and it built buzz for the book’s launch.

Intellectually, Chris has also thought about giving entire books away, free, on blogs or otherwise, and this is becoming something of a micro-trend.

The book, it should be said, did rather well. On the other hand, I should also say that I personally, having read the original article and the blog (and finding Chris’s idea profound and spot-on), did feel that I didn’t need to read the book when it came out. I was comfortable that I already knew the ideas behind it very well.

Chris has a lot of support. Tim Sullivan, who is not my editor but an editor of books, at Basic Books as of this week, told me that:

I’m all for divulging in blog-length entries. You can really work through some issues, and I think that it encourages sales rather than depressing them (in most cases). I also think you end up with a better book, in the end, if you can generate involvement from a group of interested outsiders

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (left) wrote their new book, Groundswell, using the blog to test and refine ideas and seem to have loved the process.

Jeff Howe (right) has been blogging his book Crowdsourcing, and using the blog in part, well, to crowdsource. (Meaning: to make “open calls” on the anonymous audience to contribute knowledge, in the hope that the best-qualified people may be hiding in the crowd.)

The “cons”:

My mom is a con. Now, it’s no fair poking fun at moms–they are the people whose intentions toward us are purest. So I won’t. I take her concerns seriously. And she has support: Virtually all of the, ahem, “older” people I know react with dread: Are you crazy? Somebody will steal your best ideas! You undermine the element of surprise! Don’t do it! If you must blog, don’t give anything good away.

Then, there is…

Everybody else:

That category, obviously, includes a lot of people. I’m in it myself. Among my colleagues at The Economist, for instance, there is Tom Standage, author of several books, the latest of which is A History of the World in Six Glasses (right). He is one of the most tech-savvy and media-savvy people in the world, and yet he resides slightly toward my mom’s end of the spectrum. He puts up a “teaser” about his book and some updates about the process–launch, book tour and such–but otherwise leaves it to the book itself to make the splash. I take his advice very seriously, especially since his genre of book and style of writing is much closer to mine than the tech-centered books above.

There is also Edward Lucas, who had a blog for many years before he sold his idea for a book on Russia, the New Cold War (left).

Ed says that yes, he did crowdsource. Exactly once, in fact. He had to fact-check a detail during pre-launch production, and put it out there. Within an hour, several people got back to him with the answer.

But beyond that, he says he did not give away much from the book on the blog, which he uses mainly as a personalized and running anthology of The Economist’s Russia coverage. When he tried to have discussion boards on individual chapters, the results were disappointing–”mostly Russians posting obscenities.” He thought about putting the introduction online, and maybe a few chapters, but then decided against it. “The book must promise that it gives you something you can get nowhere else,” he said to me.

And on and on. Everybody has a different view. Basically, nobody knows.

And that leaves me… schizophrenic. Which is not a good thing for a blogger. It’s like blogging with one arm tied behind your back–possible, but tedious.

Within the coming weeks, I will sort out my thoughts on this and decide one way or the other. You’ll know when that happens, because the blog will show it.

The interesting tidbit for writers, however, was our spontaneous and passionate agreement on a matter of literary fashion: the First Person. We were not entirely against it, but extremely skeptical.

American publishers tend to push writers into “personalizing” their non-fiction stories. Journalists, especially columnists, are increasingly doing the same thing. Personalizing can indeed be a good thing, in the sense that good stories need characters, and writers need to present them colorfully. The problem is that “I” tends to be the wrong character to put into the story.

If you are writing a book about an earth-shattering event, conspiracy, cover-up, war, disease or what have you, and you were genuinely a protagonist in that story, by all means, personalize away. Tell us what happened to you. That is the story.

But if you’re just telling a good story, and then looking for ways to use the word I, please stop. Why do we have entire paragraphs in The Atlantic (otherwise one of my favorite magazines) whose sole purpose is to say that so-and-so “told me” such-and-such, which was probably utterly banal? Well, because the writer wants to prove to us that he was there, you see. At The Economist, we believe that readers already assume that we were there and, besides, don’t much care either way, because they just want a cracking good story or analysis. So by I-ing and me-ing, you’re really just getting in the way of the story. You’re turning sophisticated readers off.

Once you try writing without the First Person, you may find it surprisingly difficult. Which is why it is such excellent discipline! Without the I, you can’t fake it. You can’t give us the three-paragraph “color” opening about how “I was walking into his office on a sunny March day” and so forth. You actually have to deliver a detail or observation that is telling. Much harder to do!

So I kept telling my students at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to try leaving the First Person out. They kept ignoring me. Through blogs and email and all those columns, it has seeped into our writing culture. It’s just so much easier.

The result is reams and reams of writing that is narcissistic. I could highlight one or two high-profile books and articles, but I know better. (Also, I admit that some of them do become best-sellers, which may be why publishers push the First Person so hard.) But next time you’re reading an I piece, try stripping out the First Person and seeing what content or substance is left. If a lot, good article. If not a lot, it was a narcissist.

But I did say that neither Tom nor I was* completely against the First Person. I’m using it in this blog, obviously. (Then again, a blog is by definition an ultra-personal medium.) And I’ve also, after agonizing about it, decided to use it in my book, which I am–yes–”personalizing.”

The challenge I see is to do this without being narcissistic and interrupting a cracking good story for the heck of it. In short, it is about finding an authentic voice or tone. That, of course, is true whether you’re using the First Person or not.

(*Bonus: did the was surprise you? Did you think it should be were? Nope, was is correct. More to come in future posts.)

… especially when your children are on your back, and a full-time job, and …..

How does Tom Standage make it look so easy?