Skip to content

The Economist + me

One of the many unusual things about The Economist is that we have no bylines, meaning that the articles are not signed by writers and are thus anonymous. Our official rationale for that, somewhere on this page, is that

what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

This frustrates some readers and–or so rumor has it–even some writers. A lot of you want to know who wrote an article that you liked, or what a person you know has written. (More about this issue here.)

Well, I’ve been writing for The Economist for more than twelve years now. We switch “beats” every few years, so I’m in my fourth beat now. (More about this here.) My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that I must have written about six hundred stories in that time. Some huge, some small. So this is not a comprehensive list. Just a little sample. I’ve organized it by story categories. That way you also learn a bit about our nomenclature.

Christmas Specials

Those are the quirky and off-beat pieces we write for our Christmas issue, which is on news kiosks for two weeks over the winter holidays. Here are Christmas Specials I have written:

Socrates in America: Arguing to death, December 17th, 2009

What would Socrates think about the way Americans talk to one another today? What would Americans think about Socrates? A thought exercise about American democracy, conformism and individualism, good and bad conversations, and more. This story came out of a thread right here on The Hannibal Blog!

The Filipina Sisterhood: An anthropology of happiness, December 20th, 2001.

This is my favorite story ever. Why are the poor and down-trodden Filipina maids in Hong Kong cheerful and apparently happy, when their rich and successful Chinese employers are reliably miserable and cranky? Lessons for all of us!

American Spirituality: Where “California” bubbled up, December 19th, 2007.

Here I report from the Mecca of the counterculture and the New Age, the hot baths at Esalen in Big Sur on the Pacific Coast. What happened to all those Hippies? Shamans? Yogis? How is the enlightenment-genre doing these days?

Special Reports

Formerly called “surveys” (to great confusion among our American readers), these are the largest, longest things that a writer at The Economist can write. A Special Report is really a long essay–about 12,000 words–in coherent chapters. We sort of hide a little byline in the “rubric” (or sub-headline) or the first chapter, but many readers don’t understand that the entire package of articles in a Special Report is written by the same author and belongs together. (Especially online, that’s not always clear. Look at the chapter outline, “Related Items”, in the right column.)

I’ve written four Special Reports so far. In reverse chronological order:

Mobility: Nomads at last, April 10th, 2008.

A sociological, anthropological and psychological look at how our mobile technologies, such as mobile phones, WiFi, laptops and so forth, are changing the way we work, live, love, think, speak and write. And a podcast at the end.

New media: Among the audience, April 20th, 2006. (This won an award.)

A look at how technology changes the media and society, from Gutenberg to blogs, podcasts, wikis and so forth. Includes a few podcasts we did, which happen to be The Economist‘s first ever!

Information technology: Make it simple, October 28th, 2004.

My dirge about complexity in technology, and promise of simplicity as the ‘next big thing’.

Asian Business: In Praise of Rules, April 5th, 2001.

From South-East Asia to China, the past, present and future of business, companies and law. And, of course, those colorful tycoons!

People profiles

We have several types of profile. One is a Face Value. This is a column, just under 1,000 words long, on the last page of the Business Section in the magazine. The best ones are not just profiles of people in business, but almost psychological deconstructions of a character facing a particular dilemma, predicament or opportunity.

Another is a Brain Scan. This is a column, just under 2,000 words long, at the end of our Technology Quarterly. We think of this as a sort of “living obituary” of somebody who has made an unusually interesting contribution to technology.

Yet another is an Obituary, which is just what it sounds like.

Here are my Brain Scans, Face Values and my one (so far) Obituary, in reverse chronological order:

Pattabhi Jois (Ashtanga Yoga guru)

Carol Bartz, Yahoo! now, formerly Autodesk

Sergey Brin (Google)

Jerry Yang (Yahoo!)

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)

Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter, etc)

Meg Whitman (then CEO of eBay)

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Terry Semel (then CEO of Yahoo!. Well-timed: He stepped down soon after.)

Mena Trott (Six Apart, Movable Type, Live Journal)

Craig McCaw (Clearwire)

Ray Ozzie (Microsoft)

Carl Bass (Autodesk)

Scott McNealy (Sun Micrososystems. Also well-time: He stepped down soon after this.)

Larry Page (Google)

Mitchell Baker (Firefox)

David Sifry (Technorati)

Steve Jobs (Apple)

Bruce Chizen (then Adobe)

Nick Carr (author)

Bikram Choudhury (Bikram Yoga. A favorite.)

Scott McNealy (Then Sun Microsystems. First of two.)

Darl McBride (SCO)

Ho Ching (Singapore elite)

Li Ka-shing (Hong Kong’s and Asia’s biggest tycoon)

John Gokongwei (Filipino tycoon. A favorite.)

Barry Lam (Taiwanese tycoon.)

Frank Lowy (Australian tycoon behind Westfield malls)

Tony Tan (Filipino entrepreneur behind Jollibee. A favorite.)

Liu Chuanzhi (Chinese entrepreneur behind Legend, now Lenovo)

Yang Lan (Chinese TV star)

Morris Chang (founder of TSMC in Taiwan)

Dhanin Chearavanont (Thai tycoon)

Wu Jichuan (Chinese government minister. Perhaps my all-time favorite!)

Jack Ma (China, founder of Alibaba.)

Richard Li (son of Li Ka-shing, head of PCCW in Kong Kong)

Lee Hsien Yang (Singapore elite)

Mark Mobius (celebrity investor)

Henri de Castries (French heir to AXA)

Kees Storm (Dutch, head of Aegon. My very first Face Value ever!)

Briefings

Also known as “three-pagers” internally, briefings are just under 3,000 words. In every issue we have one in “the front”–ie, the half of the magazine that has geographical sections, such as “Europe” or “Britain”–and one in “the back”, between the Business, Finance or Science sections. Other people might call these “features”. We can’t, because that would be too obvious. Here is a sample of mine:

California’s water wars: Of farms, folks and fish

Inside the Googleplex (This was part of a cover package on Google.)

Apple: The Third Act

Virtual online worlds: Living a Second Life

Google: Fuzzy Maths

Telecoms and the internet: The meaning of free speech

IT in the health-care industry: The no-computer virus

Spectrum policy: On the same wavelength

China’s state-owned enterprises: The longer march

The end of the company pension: Passing the buck (this won an award.)

If anybody (I mean, anybody) is actually still reading, this far down the page: I’ll add more categories as I find time…

12 Comments leave one →
  1. August 30, 2008 2:27 pm

    congrats on the award! and on 10 years at The Economist…

    Michael

  2. April 15, 2009 7:23 am

    Andreas, kudos on the Nomad piece in particular. I’m in the depths of manuscript cement mixing for a new book and I’d like to get in touch with you. How is best to do that?

  3. April 15, 2009 8:11 am

    You just did, Johnny. If you go to the About Me page and type into the form, I get an email and will reply.
    I’m very intrigued by your book. Right off the bat, I know you should contact my colleague Tom Standage, who has written, among other things, “The Victorian Internet”.

  4. Kaushik Satish permalink
    May 8, 2009 4:30 am

    Andreas -

    I bumped into your blog today. It’s an absolute pleasure to finally know the author of the New Media survey. The survey had an indelible impact on me – considering I was then working with a new media company that had disastrously merged with a old media company. I’m sure you’ve figured the company out by now. For a lot of us, the survey helped us understand for the first time the many big changes the industry was witnessing, but had no words to describe or no context to understand. For example, the company I was working with was still in denial of the power of user-generated content, forget reconciling itself to an era of participatory media. I still think it is the best survey I’ve so far read in the Economist.

    Congratulations on your 10th year at the Economist, and all the best for your new beat!

  5. May 8, 2009 8:20 am

    Thank you, Kaushik! I love hearing this sort of thing, as you can imagine. There’s nothing better for a writer than knowing that his words made some tiny bit of difference to somebody.

    And yes, I have figured out your company. Pity indeed. Best of luck in future in this new-media world.

  6. September 24, 2009 12:04 pm

    I read The Filipina Sisterhood when I was learning English (when I was being inducted to the newspaper by my A Levels teacher) and I remember being impressed at the article’s insightful nature, which I have not forgotten all these years!

    Lucky me to have found the blog of a writer from my favourite newspaper (:

    • September 24, 2009 1:59 pm

      Thank you, Regina! That (ie, readers remembering what I write years later) is what I live for.

  7. October 18, 2009 1:12 am

    Interesting thankyou for the links

  8. Luke Carlson permalink
    March 10, 2010 12:12 am

    I’m just curious… How does one become a journalist for The Economist?

    • March 10, 2010 10:40 am

      Hi Luke.

      There is no “how” (ie, no formula or set process or shortcuts).

      There aren’t many of us (I’m talking about Editorial only), and we don’t change jobs often, so there is extremely little turnover.

      In my case, it took me years of expressing interest (and doing other things) until I was hired in 1997.

      It helps, of course, if you have written great stuff elsewhere. ;)

Trackbacks

  1. A name to call my own: the unanonymous Economist and a couple of superflous images. « Katrina Bishop
  2. Baby P, the BNP and the death of anonymity « Lara King

Leave a Reply

Note: You can use basic XHTML in your comments.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS