History

The Economist was established in 1843 by James Wilson, a hatmaker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, to campaign against the protectionist Corn Laws. The tariffs were repealed in 1846 but the newspaper lived on as “a political, literary, and general newspaper”, never abandoning its belief in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. (It did, however, abandon the Oxford comma.)

The Corn Laws, which by taxing and restricting imports of grain made bread expensive and starvation common, were bad for Britain. Free trade, in Wilson’s view, was good for everyone. Wilson believed “that reason is given to us to sit in judgment over the dictates of our feelings.” Reason convinced him in particular that Adam Smith was right, and that through its invisible hand the market benefited profit-seeking individuals and society alike. Wilson was himself a manufacturer and wanted especially to influence “men of business”. Accordingly, he insisted that all the arguments and propositions put forward in his paper should be based on fact and rigour. That was why he called it The Economist.

Though Wilson founded The Economist, the newspaper’s greatest editor was his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot (pronounced BAJ-ut), who was the paper’s third editor, from 1861 to 1877. He broadened the range of the paper into politics; he was also responsible for greatly strengthening the interest in America that The Economist has always shown. The paper’s influence grew under his editorship. One British foreign secretary, Lord Granville, said that whenever he felt uncertain, he liked to wait and see what the next issue of The Economist had to say. A later admirer of Bagehot’s was Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921.

Another remarkable editor was appointed in 1922: Walter Layton, whose achievement, in the words of The Economist’s historian, Ruth Dudley Edwards in her book “The Pursuit of Reason”— was to ensure that the paper was “read widely in the corridors of power abroad as well as at home”, a reputation it continues to enjoy today. His successor, Geoffrey Crowther, developed and improved the coverage of foreign affairs (especially with regard to America) and business.

From its earliest days, The Economist had looked abroad, both for subjects to write about and for readers. Even in the 1840s it had subscribers in continental Europe and America. By 1938 half its sales were outside Britain. Crowther’s great innovation was to start a section devoted to American affairs, which he did just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. The “American Survey” section (renamed “United States” in 1997) was aimed not at Americans but at British readers who, Crowther believed, needed to know more about their new allies. In time, however, it earned a following in the United States too.

For most of its existence The Economist was content with a small readership. When Bagehot stood down as editor, circulation was just 3,700, and by 1920 it had climbed to only 6,000. After the second world war it rose rapidly, but from a base of barely 18,000. When Crowther left it stood at only 55,000, not reaching 100,000 until 1970. Today circulation is 1.5m, more than four-fifths of it outside Britain. Subscribers in the United States and Canada account for 57% of the total.

In recent decades the paper has added sections devoted to Europe, Asia, Latin America, China, and science and technology. It has also expanded coverage of books, arts and culture, and introduced columns on financial markets (Buttonwood), business (Schumpeter), Asian politics (Banyan) and Latin America (Bello).

The Economist has also been active in its pursuit of new readers on digital platforms. The newspaper started publishing online in 1996, and has more recently launched a daily news app (Espresso), a bilingual English-Chinese product (Global Business Review) and a virtual-reality app (Economist VR). Economist Radio produces several podcasts a week, and Economist Films produces short- and long-form video. The social-media department maintains widely followed accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, LINE, Medium and other social networks.

Frequently asked questions

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Diversity policy

The Economist Group values diversity. We are committed to equal opportunities and creating an inclusive environment for all our employees. We welcome applicants regardless of ethnic origin, national origin, gender, race, colour, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation or age.

Staff diversity data

The Economist is committed to equal opportunities and creating an inclusive environment for all our employees. We welcome applicants regardless of ethnic origin, national origin, gender, race, colour, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation or age. Here we present data on the gender, and race and ethnicity of our editorial department. As a British newspaper, our home city is London, where we hire and train most of our editorial staff, drawing on an international pool of talent.

Governance

Board - Directors

Trustees

The trust shares of the company are held by trustees, whose consent is needed for certain corporate activities, such as the appointments of the editor of The Economist and of the chairman of the Group.

Ethics

The Economist strives for the highest ethical standards. Our approach falls under two headings:

Author anonymity

Most newspapers and magazines use bylines to identify the journalists who write their articles. The Economist, however, does not. Its articles lack bylines and its journalists remain anonymous. Why?

Part of the answer is that The Economist is maintaining a historical tradition that other publications have abandoned. Leaders are often unsigned in newspapers, but everywhere else there has been rampant byline inflation (to the extent that some papers run picture bylines on ordinary news stories). Historically, many publications printed articles without bylines or under pseudonyms to give individual writers the freedom to assume different voices and to enable early newspapers to give the impression that their editorial teams were larger than they really were. The first few issues of The Economist were, in fact, written almost entirely by James Wilson, the founding editor, though he wrote in the first-person plural.

But having started off as a way for one person to give the impression of being many, anonymity has since come to serve the opposite function at The Economist: it allows many writers to speak with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed and debated each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. Accordingly, articles are often the work of The Economist’s hive mind, rather than of a single author. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, our editor from 1938 to 1956, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself…it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.” The notable exception to The Economist’s no-byline rule, at least in the weekly issue, is special reports, the collections of articles on a single topic that appear in the newspaper every month or so. These are almost always written by a single author whose name appears once, in the rubric of the opening article. By tradition, retiring editors write a valedictory editorial which is also signed. But print articles are otherwise anonymous.

Different rules apply on our website, however. A few years ago we decided to start using initials as bylines on our blog posts, to avoid confusion on our multi-author blogs (such as Democracy in America, which covers American politics). Our journalists can and do disagree with each other on our blogs, so we use initials to enable readers to distinguish between different writers. This approach is not without its faults (we have four staff members with the initials “J.P.”, for example) but is the best compromise between total anonymity and full bylines, in our view. We also identify our journalists when they appear in our audio and video output. And many of them tweet under their own names. The internet has caused our no-byline policy to fray a little around the edges, then, but the lack of bylines remains central to our identity and a distinctive part of our brand.

Audience engagement

The Economist has been published since September 1843 to take part “in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. We have used this mission statement to guide our coverage since 1843. Digital technologies and the ease of mass online communication enable us to engage in this severe contest in ways that our founding editor could not have imagined.

We post our content across online and social channels, and encourage our audiences to engage with it, for example by commenting and sharing. We have a team of community editors and social-media writers who use our content to provoke the severe contest among our online audiences. The channels we use include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium and LINE. Which channels we use, and how we use them, changes as the nature of online media consumption changes.

We also use various digital opportunities to engage audiences more specifically around certain topics, stories or journalists. For example, we host online Q&As during which audiences can interact with our journalists. We also sometimes involve audiences in the process of producing our journalism, such as calling for input on Twitter or Medium. And we publish blog posts on our Medium publication about how we work, engaging in discussion about the process of journalism itself.

Unnamed sources

• We make use of unnamed sources and conversations on background because they can be more informative.
• We may withhold the name of a source who talks to us on the record, if that individual might be put in danger or legal jeopardy if their name is revealed or if we deem it otherwise unnecessary to name them.
• We strive to describe unnamed sources with as much detail as we think readers need to assess their credibility.

Fact-checking standards

• We aim to ensure that any fact, figure or quotation is checked for accuracy and credibility by our fact-checkers. (This applies to all articles published in the newspaper, Snapchat editions, our Espresso app, video scripts and online, but not to all blog posts, some of which are self-published by their authors.) We have a dedicated Research Department to support this task.
• Authors are expected to write with fact-checking in mind, and should be ready to provide source material and to discuss and respond to questions.
• We work on edited copy as close to the final version as deadlines allow.
• We check against original sources that we believe to be reliable; for items that cannot be verified directly we form a view based on other credible information.
• We also consider whether the context and presentation of the facts are fair.
• There is no standard process and the methods adopted will depend on the nature of the material and the need for timely reporting of (often breaking) news.
• We discuss queries with the author or editor.
• All queries must be resolved before a story is published. The final say on any matter rests with the relevant editor.

Corrections

We aim to acknowledge serious factual errors and correct such mistakes quickly, clearly and appropriately. Online, published corrections should note what was wrong, what was put right and when. In print, we will publish a correction in the same section in a future issue of the newspaper. Readers who wish to bring errors to our attention may e-mail letters@economist.com.