The Economist’s social media team has launched Inside The Economist, a Medium blog created to offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at its writing, reporting and production processes.
Ricardo Bilton of Nieman Lab writes, “Denise Law, The Economist’s community editor, said Medium is home to the kind of ‘globally curious audience’ that The Economist wants to target. ‘We felt that Medium was a place where people were having intelligent discussions. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, which are places to just push out content, we felt like Medium was a place where we felt we could have intelligent debate and discussion with and extremely intelligent audience,’ she said.
“Inside The Economist is just one facet of The Economist’s Medium strategy, which has evolved significantly since it started to experiment with the platform in mid 2015. The newspaper saw its earliest success on Medium with its Severe Contest blog, which its social media team created to publish insights about the successes and failures of its social and distribution experiments. In Correspondents’ Notebooks, Economist reporters share the stories behind their reporting, such as West Africa correspondent Rachel Savage’s experiences racing camels in Kenya and political editor John Peet’s thoughts on reporting on the state of the European Union.
“According to Law, the success of these efforts, particularly Inside The Economist, is a product of readers’ appetite for personality and transparency, neither of which the no-bylines Economist is able to offer much of in its print pages or on its website. ‘Medium lends itself to doing these kinds of experiments,’ Law said.”
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