The Economist adapts to the social media age

Adam Smith, the deputy community editor at The Economist, writes about how the publication has adapted to social media when it uses no bylines in its print edition.

Smith writes, “But on the internet, accountability brings out the trolls. Anonymity thus helps us to reduce our journalists’ exposure to trolls. We are not afraid of criticism — we welcome it, as Rachel Lloyd explained in an earlier post. But trolls are people who go beyond criticism, hurling insults at journalists for covering a certain topic or taking a certain angle on it. Our journalists are comfortable when critics point out factual errors or engage in a debate about interpretations of the facts, but they should not be subject to personal abuse. So keeping the bulk of our stories anonymous goes some way to protecting our journalists from vicious tweets or comments. Again, this is probably not something Wilson had in mind in 1843 when he decided not to use bylines in his new newspaper.

“In summary, although we maintain anonymity in our newspaper, we find that on social media it cannot really hold. And nor should it. We want our journalists to use their voices — to be out in the world, talking and listening to people. Journalists have always turned up to the street where the political rally is happening, and spoken to the people there. They should continue to do the same in the digital town squares we all now use.

“At the same time, we hope that continuing to use a single voice for the bulk of our stories helps us cut through the noise of social media in a distinctive way. But this requires us to adapt our single voice: fortunately our writing style has become crisper since 1843. (George Orwell didn’t write his six rules on writing, which we adopted for our style book, until 1946.) But emoji didn’t exist in 1946 or 1843 — and now we sometimes use them. The game of social media is to experiment, measure, adapt and repeat. It will be fascinating to see where this newspaper is in another 173 years. We won’t be here then, just as Wilson isn’t here now. But the tradition of anonymity he upheld will probably have survived—and evolved.”

Read more here.