The pros and cons of anonymity at The Economist

University of Navarra professor Angel Arrese writes in Journalism Practice about why The Economist doesn’t use bylines on its articles.

Arrese writes, “Anonymity has allowed The Economist to manage its newsroom and its network of correspondents and collaborators in a very peculiar way, under the principle of understanding journalism as a truly collective work. The possibility of having prestigious authors and public personalities that write for the magazine and that would not write under the signature system; the ability to check and collectively improve every text that is going to be published; the flexibility to work with a very small newsroom compared to its competitors, and with a news staff structure (at different times in its history) composed of sometimes peculiar profiles (especially young people, high female proportion, etc.): these are just some of the aspects of newsroom management enabled by anonymity, which set up the unique way of doing journalism typical of The Economist. In this way of doing, collective work is paramount and is the basis of managing news quality, which contrasts with many journalism trends in recent times, which promote the visibility of individual works, and foster the idea that technology ‘allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and, in theory, with global reach’ (Gillmor 2004, xxiii).

“Finally, anonymity has contributed to the strength of The Economist brand at least in two dimensions. On the one hand, that the only public identity of the weekly is the weekly itself—not its directors and journalists, or its collaborators—has made it possible for the marketing of the magazine to exploit a very clear connection between its image—just see the successful poster campaign of The Economist– and its essential identity as a product (values, themes, ideas, style, tone, etc.). On the other hand, the very practice of anonymity has become an essential feature of the magazine’s brand identity, which implicitly or explicitly has been perceived in the market as something unique, as a central element for the quality and authority projected by the magazine.

“As a matter of fact, the practice of anonymity poses challenges and problems of many kinds, and it will be a challenge to keep it alive in the future, in the age of transparency and visibility. At the same time, the anonymity practised by The Economist is not a model easily adaptable to other news media, which can hardly take advantage of such a special and historically rooted tradition, as well as of such a unique and inimitable personality. However, the spirit of this anonymous weekly, and the lessons that we can learn from it, have an undeniable value in the current context of journalism practice and news media management, characterized by crisis thinking and doubts about professional and organizational identity.”