What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position". That is as true today as when Crowther [Geoffrey, Economist editor 1938–1956] said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.
The Economist sponsors the yearly "Economist Innovation Awards", in the categories of bioscience, computing and communications, energy and the environment, social and economic innovation, business-process innovation, consumer products, and a special "no boundaries" category. The awards have been held since 2002. Nominations are held between 2 and 30 April. The award ceremony is then hosted on 15 November. Choices are based off the following factors:
In 1999, The Economist organized a global futurist writing competition, The World in 2050. Co-sponsored by Royal Dutch/Shell, the competition included a first prize of US$20,000 and publication in The Economist's annual flagship publication, The World In. Over 3,000 entries from around the world were submitted via a website set up for the purpose and at various Royal Dutch Shell offices worldwide.
The judging panel included Bill Emmott, Esther Dyson, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart (then-chairman of Royal Dutch Shell), and Matt Ridley (a British scientist and member of the House of Lords).
The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group. The publications of the group include the CFO brand family as well as the annual The World in..., the lifestyle bimonthly 1843, European Voice, and Roll Call. Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of the company from 1972 to 1989.
In 1877, the publication's circulation was 3,700, and in 1920 it had risen to 6,000. Circulation increased rapidly after 1945, reaching 100,000 by 1970.
Circulation is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). From around 30,000 in 1960 it has risen to near 1 million by 2000 and by 2016 to about 1.3 million. Sales inside North America were in 2007 around 54 per cent of the total, with sales in the UK making up 14 per cent of the total and continental Europe 19 per cent. The Economist claims sales, both by subscription and at newsagents, in over 200 countries. Of its American readers, two out of three earn more than $100,000 a year.
There is a section of economic statistics. Tables such as employment statistics are published each week and there are special statistical features too. It is unique among British weeklies in providing authoritative coverage of official statistics and its rankings of international statistics have been decisive. In addition, The Economist is known for its Big Mac Index, which it first published in 1986, which uses the price of the hamburger in different countries as an informal measure of the purchasing power of currencies.
In 1991, James Fallows argued in The Washington Post that The Economist used editorial lines that contradicted the news stories they purported to highlight. In 1999, Andrew Sullivan complained in The New Republic that it uses "marketing genius" to make up for deficiencies in analysis and original reporting, resulting in "a kind of Reader's Digest" for America's corporate elite. Although he acknowledged that the magazine's claim about the Dotcom bubble bursting would probably be accurate in the long run (the bubble burst in the US market two years later), Sullivan pointed out that the magazine greatly exaggerated the danger the US economy was in after the Dow Jones fell to 7,400 during the 1998 Labor Day weekend. He also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College. The Guardian wrote that "its Writers rarely see a political or economic Problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation".
In 1999, The Economist organized a global futurist writing competition, The World in 2050. Co-sponsored by Royal Dutch/Shell, the competition included a first prize of US$20,000 and publication in The Economist's annual flagship publication, The World In. Over 3,000 entries from around the world were submitted via a website set up for the purpose and at various Royal Dutch Shell offices worldwide.
The Economist sponsors the yearly "Economist Innovation Awards", in the categories of bioscience, computing and communications, Energy and the environment, social and economic innovation, business-process innovation, consumer products, and a special "no boundaries" category. The awards have been held since 2002. Nominations are held between 2 and 30 April. The award ceremony is then hosted on 15 November. Choices are based off the following factors:
Many articles include some witticism; image captions are often humorous puns and the letters section usually concludes with an odd or light-hearted letter. These efforts at humour have sometimes had a mixed reception. For Example, the cover of the 20 September 2003 issue, headlined by a story on the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancún, featured a cactus giving the middle finger. Readers sent both positive and negative letters in response.
In 2005, the Chicago Tribune named it the best English-language magazine noting its strength in international reporting "where it does not feel moved to cover a faraway land only at a time of unmitigated disaster" and that it kept a wall between its reporting and its more conservative editorial policies.
On 15 June 2006, Iran banned the sale of The Economist when it published a map labelling the Persian Gulf simply as "Gulf"—a choice that derives its political significance from the Persian Gulf naming dispute.
Since July 2007, there has also been a complete audio edition of the news magazine available 9pm London time on Thursdays. The audio version of The Economist is produced by the production company Talking Issues. The company records the full text of the news magazine in mp3 format, including the extra pages in the UK edition. The weekly 130 MB download is free for subscribers and available for a fee for non-subscribers.
In 2008, Jon Meacham, former Editor of Newsweek and a self-described "fan", criticised The Economist's focus on analysis over original reporting.
The news magazine goes to press on Thursdays, between 6pm and 7pm GMT, and is available at newsagents in many countries the next day. It is printed at seven sites around the world. Known on their website as "This week's print edition", it is available online, albeit with only the first five viewed articles being free (and available to subscribers only mid-October 2009 – 2010).
In 2012, The Economist was accused of hacking into the computer of Justice Mohammed Nizamul Huq of the Bangladesh Supreme Court, leading to his resignation as the chairman of the International Crimes Tribunal. The magazine denied the accusations.
On 19 August 2013, The Economist disclosed that the Missouri Department of Corrections had censored its issue of 29 June 2013. According to the letter sent by the department, prisoners were not allowed to receive the issue because "1. it constitutes a threat to the security or discipline of the institution; 2. may facilitate or encourage Criminal activity; or 3. may interfere with the rehabilitation of an offender".
In 2014, the magazine withdrew a harshly-criticised review of a book by Edward Baptist on slavery and American capitalism; The Economist had complained that "[a]lmost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains." Baptist attributed the harsh review to the magazine's adherence to "free-market fundamentalist" theories, "the idea that everything would be better if measured first and last by its efficiency at producing profit."
The Economist published in 2015 its first US college rankings, focused on comparable economical advantages defined as 'the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much its students subsequently earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere'. Based on set of strict criteria sourced from US Department of Education ("College Scorecard") with relevant 'expected earnings' and multiple statistics applied in calculation of 'median earnings' conclusive evaluation method has been applied to run the scorecard's earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a Common method of measuring the relationships between variables.
