Why the Economist’s Espresso doesn’t have story links

Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, spoke with Nieman Journalism Lab about The Economist Espresso, a morning briefing from its editors.

Here is an excerpt:

The content is all written internally. The longer pieces (150-word ‘chunks’) are written by our beat correspondents, the same people who write articles in the weekly. The shorter ‘gobbets’ on the ‘World In Brief’ page are written by the editors of Espresso.

We have two full-time editors on Espresso, and they are supported by the rest of the Economist’s editorial infrastructure: correspondents, the data/graphics team, the picture desk, the research/fact-checking department, and so on. We also have a rota of people in Washington, D.C., and Singapore who update it overnight, but they are drawn from the ranks of our editorial staff, rather than being dedicated to Espresso.

We insert a link or two in Espresso each day, but it’s always to background reading in The Economist. We don’t link to other sites. The idea is to maintain ‘finishability.’ If links are what you want, there’s no shortage of other things to read. There are lots of good morning-briefing emails that are stuffed with links to interesting articles, but the idea of Espresso is that once it has arrived, you can read it without having to click on links or visit other sites or wait for things to load, and then when you’ve read it, you’re up to speed.

We’ve had 900,000 app downloads. Daily reach is 100,000 and weekly reach is about 200,000. Around 300,000 existing Economist subscribers have activated access to Espresso and we’ve had more than 50,000 people try the free one-month trial.

Read more here.