“Would You Rather Fight One Horse-Sized Silvio Berlusconi Or 100 Duck-Sized Silvio Berlusconis?”

January 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tom Standage, the Digital Editor at the Economist just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit about that singular publication. A few exchanges about the company culture and hiring practices.

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Question:

Who are your articles geared towards with regard to audience – professionals or academics?

Answer:

They are geared towards a curious alien who has just landed and speaks English. This is why we say things like “Ford, a carmaker.”

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Question:

I was the Richard Casement intern at the Economist last year. I saw that journalists at the paper worked normal hours (9 to 6ish). But there was no one keeping time. People came in and left whenever they wanted. The office was open 24 hours.

I know many who worked from home many times. My boss (science & tech editor) works from home 2 days every week (not counting the weekend of course).

Answer:

Thanks, Akshat! Yes, there isn’t really a culture of presenteeism here. Nobody really minds where you are, as long as you do your job.

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Question:

I’ve always found that The Economist has a clear, effective, straight-to-the-point writing style, which is very enjoyable (to me at least).

I was wondering: is that something that’s explicitly asked of staff writers? If so, how do you (or someone else) help your colleagues achieve that? 

Answer:

When we hire people, we basically ignore the CVs and just look at the sample articles they send in. (We ask people to submit “an article they think would be suitable for publication”, or somesuch.) If the article contains a brilliant idea, or is written perfectly to our style, or ideally both, then that person goes on the shortlist. The great thing about our style, from the perspective of being a writer, is that it’s pretty clear what the target is that you’re supposed to hit. If you can hit it, then your copy will hardly be edited at all as it goes up the editorial chain. If you can’t, then it will be edited ruthlessly, which encourages you to try harder next time. This seems to work.

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Question:

I know that the editorial staff at the Economist hates Silvio Berlusconi, so I have to ask…

Would you rather fight one horse sized Silvio Berlusconi or 100 duck sized Silvio Berlusconis?

Answer:

I’ve always seen this question from the perspective of a gamer. Do I prefer fighting lots of small enemies while crawling a dungeon, or fighting the boss at the end? I generally find boss fights quite tedious, because they either involve exploiting the boss’s unusual vulnerability, usually heavily signposted, using a recently acquired item (I’m looking at you, Zelda games), or it’s simply a matter of grinding the enemy down (as with a dragon in Skyrim). We could speculate about what the amusing weak spot of a horze-sized Berlusconi might be, but I think I’d prefer to pick off the 100 duck-sized ones.

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