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. I’ve written three Christmas Specials:

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?

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. (And it grew out of a thread on this blog!)

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.

• The new nomadism
• Working from anywhere
• A nomadic environment
• Family ties
• Mobility and location
• Nomadic monitoring
• Homo mobilis
• Audio interview

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!

• Among the audience
• It’s the links, stupid
• Compose yourself
• The wiki principle
• Heard on the street
• Wonders of the metaverse
• The gazillion-dollar question
• What sort of revolution?
• Sources and acknowledgements
• Offer to readers
• Audio interview: Andreas Kluth
• Audio interview: David Sifry
• Audio interview: Chris Anderson
• Audio interview: Jerry Michalski
• Audio interview: Paul Saffo

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

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

• Make it simple
• Now you see it, now you don’t
• A byte’s-eye view of complexity
• If in doubt, farm it out
• Spare me the details
• The mom test
• Metaphorically speaking
• Hearing voices
• The blood of incumbents
• Author interview

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!

• In praise of rules
• Empires without umpires
• The ancient art of making money
• The best and the rest
• From bamboo to bits and bytes
• The giant stirs
• A lesson in capitalism
• Of laws and men
• By train, by bus or on foot?
• The greatest leap forward

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:

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…