How The Economist’s Espresso attracts readers

Allison Schultes of Storybench.org interviewed Jason Palmer, the founding editor of The Economist’s Espresso, which presents the top stories of the day in 150-word snippets.

Here is an excerpt:

In terms of The Economist being a weekly publication and Espresso being daily, how does that work in terms of workflow? Do you feel like you’re working to generate content for the next print edition as well?

This plays into another big change that was made. When it started, Espresso was rigorously stories for the day, so we were publishing in the evening for the forthcoming edition. That’s a very hard thing to do without manufacturing some pegs sometimes. We’ve since loosened that a bit, and in truth it’s a real mix in terms of the hardness of the pegs.

Sometimes it’s clear, so “the federal reserve is meeting tomorrow” or something like that, and sometimes the pegs are just launching pads for broader analysis. We’re not in the news business. We’re doing the very Economist-y thing of taking a step back and taking a wider look.

For instance, there’s the ongoing story about transgender bathrooms in the U.S. We went casting about, and there’s going to be a meeting at state-level of some activists. We know that’s coming up, we have a peg, and we can use that as a peg to talk about this broader story. A lot of the pegs fit that description.

Read more here.