Meredith Klein of Meredith and the Media interviewed Archie Hall, acting economics editor at The Economist, about his job.
Here is an excerpt:
- You’ve been at The Economist for nearly three years. You started as the Britain economics reporter, then U.S. economics reporter, and now actingeconomics editor. What’s driving your and your team’s coverage?
- The advice I got when I started was to start with the fact that we are a weekly publication. That rhythm means you have the opportunity to spend more time thinking about what you might write than if you are with a very high metabolism daily or online publication. It also means that the readers who are looking at your stuff may well look at it a couple of days after you publish it. We go to print Thursday mornings, and it arrives in the newsstands and on people’s doorsteps over the course of the weekend. You then say, “OK, what can I say that will be interesting and novel and additive to readers one week down the line, or a few days down the line? Where will the conversation go? What is going to be the crux of this debate?”
- Obviously, we do, as any news organization does, respond pretty quickly to the news when we need to. I had the joyous experience of Donald Trump announcing Kevin Warsh as his Federal Reserve chair pick at 7 a.m. on a Friday. It was reported the night before that it was going to come out that day, and I, like an idiot, thought, “This will come out later in the morning, and I’ll have plenty of time to write out my piece.”
- There are moments like that where we try to get things out quickly for readers so that they have our take on really important news. But often, the place where we try to add value is stepping back a bit. What can you add to the conversation that’s interesting, in full knowledge that there are folks like the wire services, or The New York Times, who can do an extraordinarily good job at just hitting what happens point by point?
Read more here.
