Why The Economist has no bylines

This question comes up in nearly every conversation about The Economist. Why don’t we have bylines? And will we ever change? It is one of those quaint eccentricities about us that people either love or hate, or love to hate, but at least they know about it.

(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.)

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 introducing me, then me introducing 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

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:

All those gushing book reviews

Joe Queenan in the New York Times has an amusing but stirring piece on ridiculously over-the-top book reviews–in short, most reviews:

The least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic. …

the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next 10 will roll over like pooches and insist it’s not only incandescent but luminous, too. Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road. …

such reviews are unfair to the reader, who may be hornswoggled into thinking that Philip Marlowe really would tip his hat at the author, or that the author has gone toe-to-toe with Joseph Conrad and given the ornery old cuss a thrashing. Books are described as being “compulsively readable,” when they are merely “O.K.”; “jaw-droppingly good,” when they are actually “not bad”; “impossible to put down,” when they are really “no worse than the last three.”

I found myself smirking and cringing all the way through his essay, depending on which of my various “book” hats I was wearing in a given sentence.

Hat Nr. 1: Occasional reviewer

In The Economist, of course.

The first thing to remember about a book review is that there is not only an author somewhere hoping for a good review but also a reviewer hoping to be told by his editor that he has written a good piece (ie, the review). And how boring is a review full of (to take examples from Queenan’s paragraph above) “O.K.” and “not bad” and “no worse than the last three.” Realistically, the editor would spike the entire piece.

So, the reviewer reverts to standard journalistic methodology: “Simplify and exaggerate.” (Before you foam with anger at all journalists, consider the alternative: “Complicate and obfuscate.” Right. Thought so.)

So now the review being written becomes “stronger”. The book is really good or really bad. Next question: If I make it really bad, can the author or anybody allied to him take revenge, now or later? Maybe? Well, perhaps I’m better off making it really good. But not all the time, because then I would lose credibility. Maybe make it really bad (to use Queenan’s ratio) 1 out of 11 times?

At The Economist we try to get around this in two ways:

1) We don’t have bylines, which protects the writer to a large extent. (Authors could in theory find out who trashed their book, but in practice are too awkward and self-conscious to inquire.)

2) We don’t allow conflicts of interest, and stopped reviewing books written by staff a few years ago. (I’m amazed that not all newspapers do this!) In those situations, the reviewer can only lose, and the author usually too.

I leave it up to you to decide whether this addresses all the subtleties of human nature.

Hat Nr. 2: Aspiring author

As you have noticed, I’m writing a book. And when the time comes, I am hoping that it will get fair and tough glowing and drooling reviews.

Seriously, I already dread the entire process that apparently comes next. Prostituting myself for blurbs (the moratorium I support is unlikely to come soon enough to be helpful), then again for reviews, then again on Jon Stewart (if I’m lucky).

Hat Nr. 3: Reader

God. It’s really annoying when the review does not, quickly and easily, tell me if this book is worth two weeks of my night time or not. I mean, really.

The “death” of blogging

The title is not meant literally, guys. It comes wrapped up in British irony. But I did write this piece in the current issue of The Economist about the topic.

I don’t usually use this book blog to point to my (day-job) articles. But I did get a few responses after the deadline from interesting people I tried to interview for this story. So, why not include their views here?

The tongue-in-cheek thesis of my little article is that

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death …

Blogging, in fact, may “die” as PDAs have died–by becoming invisible and ubiquitous, as a feature in almost every mobile phone today.

Evan Williams

Here, now, is what Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and now boss of Twitter, emailed me on the subject (excerpts). There is confusion, he says, between two things:

1) There’s also now a commercial blogging world. Commercial blogs do not get most of the traffic (in aggregate), but they’re what a lot of people think of when you say “blog.” But the commercial blogosphere and personal blogosphere are really different worlds. Obviously they overlap, but the motivations and activity of one does not reflect that of the other. Gawker’s cost cutting has nothing to do with Cheri Block Sabraw‘s desire to write things for teachers.

2) There are now more casual ways to scratch the same itch that blogging has done for many people. I.e., Facebook, Twitter, and a slew of other social software alternatives. This is definitely effecting the personal blogging world. It has effected my personal blogging — and that of many people I know. Twitter is now my go-to place to share a thought or a link. I still blog on occasion when I have something I can’t squeeze into 140 characters, but that’s rare, and for many people Twitter (or something else) will suffice nicely on its own. However, does that mean they’re not blogging? We’ve never labeled Twitter a “micro-blogging” service, but that’s certainly one of the primary use cases.

This gets to your point of being nowhere and everywhere, I suppose. There are tons of active blogs on MySpace and on Facebook (even though they call them “Notes”). Maybe these are just the new blogging platforms (among other things). I suppose it is PDA-like that blogs are being subsumed into social networks, like PDAs got subsumed into smartphones.

But PDAs went away as stand-alone devices, because there came a point where they held zero advantage over a smartphone. With stand-alone blogs, that may be true for the most casual users, but not for millions of otheres. There are still many advantages to a stand-alone blog: Your own brand, domain, design, etc. Creating a meaningful, independent voice on web, on which can be launched a movement, a brand, a career, or simply a good story, is best done with a stand-alone blog.

Ev.

Charlene Li

I also pinged Charlene Li, who is perhaps the best social-media analyst out there, formerly at Forrester, now at Altimeter Group.

If you think about blogging as a specific content publishing tool and formatting of content, then yes, it is being usurped by businesses and traditional media companies. In fact, traditional online content management systems and collaboration suites like Sharepoint are integrating blogging into their platforms.

But if you think of blogging as a “mindset”, then it’s not only healthy, but growing by leaps and bounds. In this way, I distinguish between a corporate blog that does nothing more than publish their press releases (but has not comments) and a blog written from a personal perspective but clearly associated and benefiting a company. Likewise, there are Twitter feeds from companies that are just RSS feeds, while @comcastcares is a genuine person at Comcast who is establishing a relationship with other Twitterers.

In the end, blogging grew because people used it as a way to connect with people and develop relationships. If it *evolves* into new formats, then it’s staying healthy, rather than stagnating.

Chris Alden

And I pinged Chris Alden, the CEO of Six Apart (WordPress’s biggest rival). Excerpts from his reply:

While the hypothesis that blogging is past its prime may be provocative,
it’s not supported by the facts. Our products continue to grow across
the board — we’ve seen more demand for blogging than ever before — and
I believe our competitors are growing too.

It may be that blog “hype” has passed its prime, as blogging has
followed the typical hype cycle and is now in the enlightenment phase
according to Gartner, but that is usually when the real growth actually
happens.

We are seeing an explosion of ways in which people and corporations are
using blogs, both for internal and external purposes, and individual
blogging, alive and well, is also evolving. Publishers, businesses, and
individuals now look to blog software and service to run much more of
their web site, in some cases using MT for their entire web CMS
platform, and integrate blogging and social media in a more profound
way.

It is of course true that newer services like Twitter have captured the
time and attention of many bloggers, and some have slowed their
traditional blogging in favor of communicating with friends through
tweets, not blog posts. But we view these as complimentary, not
competing, trends. More often than not, Twitter works in conjunction
with blogs, and many bloggers use Twitter as a new form of RSS — a way
to alert friends that there is a new blogs post. Very often Tweets refer
to blog posts, and vice versa.

We believe that blogging will have as disruptive an impact on the
mainstream social networks as it had on mainstream media. When it comes
to media, blogs were once seen as an adversary, but are now indelibly
part of the media landscape. The same type of adversarial thinking seems
to be in vogue where folks are assuming that we are seeing replacement
technologies battling it out. It sort of reminds us of the bricks/click
debates of the late 1990s. Of course we learned then that the answer
wasn’t either one or the other, but both.

In fact, blogging and social networking actually started together.
LiveJournal had both blogging and friending features, and was created in
1999. It so happens that blogging services, such as Blogger, TypePad,
and WordPress, then emerged focused on the publishing side. Then another
branch grew from that tree when Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook
focused on the social networking aspect…

The story isn’t about the passing of one trend to another, but the
evolution of blogging, and in some ways a return to its roots, and the
integration of blogging with many other forms of social media. …

Chris

Thanks to all three of you, and sorry I didn’t have time to get you into the article. (Two of you are mentioned, however.) I actually think that the four of us agree almost entirely, and that you’ve colored in the subtleties.

I mean, how could blogging be “dead” if even … Malaysia’s Mahathir now blogs!!!!

Obama

My three-year old has been yelling “Obama” all day at kindergarten.

So it’s finally over. Enough with the blogging about it now, for a while (and back to my book). But, because it is a historic moment, this last post to mark it.

From us at The Economist, two pieces:

1) Congratulations to the winner, with a warning about the burden of high expectations. And perspective:

This week America can claim more credibly that any other western country to have at last become politically colour-blind…. America will now have a president with half-brothers in Kenya, old schoolmates in Indonesia and a view of the world that seems to be based on respect rather than confrontation.

2) Condolences to the loser, who used to be, and may be again, a man to like and respect, but who became tragic:

Obama: “Well, it is The Economist.”

So, as I said, we at The Economist and our readers have endorsed. Now Barack Obama has responded. Thanks to Celina Dunlop for pointing me to this exchange between him and Katie Couric (WordPress doesn’t let me embed the video, so click through):

Couric: The Economist, while endorsing you, has also said there are some legitimate criticisms of you that John McCain should be focused on. They say that you are one of the least business-friendly Democratic candidates in a generation, that you have no experience in the business world aside from year as a consultant, and that you’re too close to unions and trial lawyers.

Obama: Well, it is The Economist. And the fact that they endorsed me, how about reading all the good stuff they said about me? (laughter)

Couric: Well, that’s in another issue. (laughter) That’s later.

The Economist endorses

Just in case you missed it, we at The Economist have endorsed, and so have our readers who may (as you should) “vote” in our global electoral college.

The cover says it all. As for the global electoral college, the world is currently “blue” by a landslide of 9,115 electoral votes to 203.

Backlash moment

I’ve been flying a lot this week, on a route that GoGo now covers (see map). Each time at the gate, a male-female pair of hip, young marketers (the woman in each case being smarter, hipper, attractive and Indian) offered me and the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types in the boarding queue a promotion to get connected via WiFi on the flight.

My reaction progressed in two steps:

Step 1) This is great! I will get on the flight, log on, snap a photo or two of the airplane aisle and then blog it right from my seat so that you all can see what a connected urban nomad I am. En passant, I would be corroborating my own thesis in my special report in The Economist on that topic (ie, “nomadism”).

Step 2) What utter nonsense! Have you lost it, Andreas? This is the last redoubt you have for reading. For the next few hours it is you and your biography of Meriwether Lewis, which is 500 pages and must be read and absorbed for you to make progress in one particular chapter of your own book. For once, no kids tugging on you, no phone ringing, no email alerts. Instead, deep, linear immersion. And you are thinking of giving that up just because… you can?

So you had no posts from me while I was in the air. And I’m guessing that you’re no worse off for it.

Incidentally, I noticed that the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types also passed on this opportunity for uninterrupted mid-air connectivity, after the same moment of initial temptation. Have we reached the point of backlash? A civilizing counter-trend?

Meaningless quotes by non-entities

Good things happen whenever I clean out my old emails. Here is one from our editor at The Economist, John Micklethwait, regarding the use and misuse of quotations in writing:

At our meeting on Friday I read out part of a letter … by Alan Parker, who used to work for us in the 1970s, and its main point was to explain – in a touchingly matter-of-fact way – that he had just discovered that he was about to die (which he did indeed do two weeks after he sent the letter). … I still think one part of it is worth passing on:

“I shall continue to read The Econ for the rest of my life, as my sub will outlast me. I shall enjoy it of course, but I should enjoy it even more if my death-wish could be granted: viz, that the editor decrees that henceforth all meaningless and trivial quotes should be excised before the copy gets anywhere near him. I cannot abide the constant oscillation between (a) serious reporting, and (b) meaningless quotes by non-entities. All I want is the story, clear and concise and preferably with a bit of style. As soon as I get to “Joe Bloggs, an accountant, says ‘these are big numbers'”, I turn over the page….”

I think he had a point. One of our hallmarks has always been avoiding the gratuitous quotes that slow down our rivals. Obviously, we should quote people when they are saying something new and refreshing – just as we should credit other news organisations. And I also accept that good sources occasionally need some form of payback; but, if you want to bring them into the story, make sure they are saying something that is original, which does not slow down the piece.

In general, our rule with quotes should be that either the singer or the song should be interesting. Thus “America is in trouble in Iraq” is worth using only if, say, the speaker is George Bush. But I would add three particular bugbears of mine. The first is beginning a paragraph with a general quote from an uninteresting source (“America is in trouble in Iraq” says Dwight Smith of the Foreign Policy Institute), when we are really just introducing a new part of our argument – and very little of what follows could be seen as Mr Smith’s unique insight. Quote Mr Smith later by all means if he has uncovered a new fact about National Guard numbers, or use him as an example of one side of a debate; but don’t hand over the paragraph to him – unless he deserves it. Second, where we do quote, we should whenever possible simplify intrusively long titles (so “Professor Dr John Smith, head of special research projects at the Joe. A. Doe Global New Media Centre at Massachessetts Institute of Technology” becomes John Smith of MIT). And, lastly, one word is often preferable to a full quote: “This research strikes me, on the basis of available evidence, as dubious,” said Professor John Smith etc can happily become, “The research is “dubious”, reckons John Smith of MIT”.

The alternative is more people turning over the page.

Just one more on metaphors, really

Well, after exhausting all of you with my recent trilogy on metaphor-mixing, I thought I was done. But I also felt guilty that I didn’t quite live up to my promise of juicy and sufficiently current examples from The Economist. Let me atone herewith.

It must be this financial “meltdown”. It’s impoverishing all of us, and to add insult to injury (is that a metaphor?) it is making metaphor mixers out of hitherto presentable magazines. I will venture a theory about this below, but let’s have fun with–oh, let’s pick a random piece from our Finance section–the first two paragraphs, including title, rubric and chart caption, of this article: (As always, different metaphors in different colors)

Domino or dynamo?

Oct 9th 2008 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition

China is pretty well placed to cushion a global downturn

CHINA has become the main engine of the world economy, accounting for one-third of global GDP growth in the first half of this year. Will it keep humming? Compared with many other emerging economies, notably Brazil and Russia, which have recently suffered big capital outflows, China has so far largely shrugged off the global credit crunch. But there are signs that China’s economy is sputtering. Export volumes have slowed markedly; the growth of industrial production dropped to a six-year low in the 12 months to August; car sales fell by 6% in the same period; and China’s property boom seems to be turning to bust.

Some of the recent slowdown reflects the temporary closure of factories around Beijing during the Olympic games, which cleared the air but made China’s statistics even hazier than usual. …

Now, you notice that I couldn’t color the caption of the chart, but “Sweet and sour” is another metaphor.

So we have: Dominos, dynamos, cushions, a lot of engine stuff (with humming and sputtering, which is fine because it belongs to the same metaphor), as well as some shrugging and crunching and flowing and the obligatory dropping, falling, sliding and so forth.

Why does this happen?

I haven’t taken the time to test this hypothesis, but I will venture to guess that newspapers were mixing fewer metaphors after 9/11. After all planes flying into skyscrapers setting off blazing infernos over the skyline, human beings jumping off of buildings and avalanches of dust shrouding an entire city don’t need metaphors. Such images are what metaphors are made of. They are not abstract but primal.

This financial crisis is the opposite. Who has seen the enemy? What does a credit-default swap look, smell, sound, taste and feel like? Has anybody ever kicked a money-market fund in the shin? Have you ever seen a mortgage-backed security go up in flames? Have “toxic” assets ever actually made you puke?

No, no, and no. This stuff is so hard to write about because it’s so abstract. I once taught a class in which I started by asking “What is money?” One or two people tried the usual “I don’t care as long as I have enough of it”. But, as in the 1930s, people are discovering that money, banknotes and coins aside, is not actually there. That’s in the Gertrude Stein sense of “There’s no there there.” Go into a bank and ask politely to see and touch your money. That’s what I mean.

Ergo: We are in huge trouble, but we can barely even describe why and how. So we stretch for metaphors from primal experience. And we overdo it.

That doesn’t mean I condone it. For good writers, the advice stands: Just say No.

The home stretch of writing

A big moment of sorts last week: I finished the first and rough draft of the book.

That doesn’t mean I’m done. But it does mean that I’ve started the second round.

What happened over the past year is roughly this: The basic idea proved better than I could have hoped. And the book almost wrote itself, much more easily and faster than I ever thought. But it took me a while to find my own, authentic, loose and easy voice (as opposed to my “The Economist” voice which I’ve become so accustomed to over the past decade). (Blogging helped, as you recall.)

And so I ended up with an unexpected trajectory: The early chapters are fine, but need improvement. Then the chapters get better and better, and the final ones absolutely rock.

So now, in the second draft, which I’m hoping will only take another month or so (all the raw material is already there), I need to bring the entire book, from the first sentence to the last, up to the quality of the later chapters.

Then I’ll mail them off to the editor at Riverhead, and see what happens next. I’m quite curious about the process….

Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history

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