KEY POINTS:
For more than 160 years, The Economist has been creating an intelligent debate while making sense of British and US politics. It has also bucked the downward trend for print media
Who said there was no future in print media?
The Economist, near death with a circulation
of fewer than 20,000 copies in the 1930s, is now regarded as one of the most successful magazine global brands in the world - on and off the internet.
Founded in 1843 (and two years later known as The Economist, Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers' Gazette and Railway Monitor ) its circulation is now over 1,100,000 - and rising.
Edited from offices tucked away between London's private clubs and the Jermyn Street statue of Regency dandy Beau Brummell, it is considered more influential in Washington than Time and Business Week. Readership of The Economist in the United States is over 540,000, more than three times the sale in its home market.
John Micklethwait, 44, is the 16th editor of this journalistic institution. His 15 predecessors - an illustrious crew that includes former ITN newsreader Sir Alastair Burnet, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Rupert Pennant-Rea and the 19th-century pioneering journalist Walter Bagehot - remained in post for an average of 11 years.
Micklethwait grew up in Rutland, a blood relative of the Duke of Norfolk. He is tall and straight-backed with a thick mop of hair, a clipped English accent and a desk that looks out across the royal parks.
Nonetheless, in the United States he is a highly regarded analyst of American affairs, a chronicler of the emergence of the vast conservative coalition and the grasp it has taken on the social values and political landscape of the world's greatest superpower.
Months before the 2004 US presidential election, with commentators on both sides of the Atlantic predicting a curtailment of the rightward march of the neocons, Micklethwait stood up before a liberal audience in New York City and rejected the notion. "America is simply different from the rest of the developed world. It takes a more conservative stand on issues because in general it embraces more conservative values."
He then reeled off a batch of statistics emphasising the divide between Britain and America, noting, for example, that a majority of Americans believe in the devil (compared to one in six in Britain). George W. Bush was re-elected, Micklethwait and his Economist colleague Adrian Wooldridge (with whom he had travelled America to compile the book The Right Nation: How Conservatism Won) were suddenly in great demand as political oracles.
In March last year, Micklethwait was promoted from US editor to editor-in-chief, and his first months at the helm have coincided with the first deployment in America of iconic white-on-red Economist advertising and promotion of the magazine in Baltimore, Denver and Austin. Latest figures show that the North American sales are up by 15 per cent year on year.
Despite this, Micklethwait denies that The Economist (which is known as a "newspaper", though it is a glossy magazine) is pitched at an American readership.
"We don't take an American viewpoint; we take a global viewpoint," he said. "I think we can be accused of not taking a British viewpoint, I will happily admit to that."
Not that The Economist doesn't have its own problems in America. Though the uninitiated might regard it as an unremittingly pro-business, right-of-centre publication - it was an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and backed both the Vietnam and Iraq wars - it is deeply proud of its classical liberal tradition, which Micklethwait insists is the very "core" of the title's philosophy. "If you look at the beginnings of The Economist, it fought against slavery, fought against capital punishment, fought for penal reform; it's always had quite a strong socially liberal side. From that perspective it's not that odd that we were among the first people to promote gay marriage, among the first people to campaign against Guantanamo. Those traditions still continue." As a general rule, The Economist backs the Republicans on economic issues and Democrats on social ones, he says. "So if you carry a copy of The Economist in America you are not identified as being on either side of the divide."
When Micklethwait was still US editor he was touted as a possible editor of the Spectator, though the top job at The Economist is a bigger prize.
His status as a writer in America gives him a certain public profile, which is a little at odds with a publication where editors' names never appear until they come to write their farewell letter to readers.
He intends to keep that low-profile tradition and says his writing with Wooldridge (they also produced a paean to business entitled The Company - a Short History of a Revolutionary Idea) has been "analytical rather than crusading".
"In terms of personality," he says, "I think the job of being an editor of The Economist is not to be in the public face the entire time. It's a question of the brand being stronger than the individual.
"The message that The Economist stands for goes on from editor to editor. A cult of personality would be dangerous, I think."
The Economist famously extends this cult of anonymity to denying bylines to journalists, unless they be famous guests such as David Cameron, Angela Merkel and new Republican champion John McCain, who all contributed to its "The World in 2007" special edition.
In a muddled modern media environment, most news organisations are busy building the brands of their writers to catch the attention of capricious consumers.
This presents a conundrum for the faceless Economist, particularly online, where it is trying to increase its presence.
"You've hit an absolutely core issue for us," says the editor. "We do have two blogs up already and I insisted on anonymity on the basis that I thought that people wanted to have a conversation with The Economist rather than individual people. There was a thin-end-of-the-wedge argument. Some people thought we should have gone to having people's names but I thought it was the wrong thing to give away [our tradition] so easily.
"I thought the anonymity was something relatively precious and worth hanging on to, partly as a brand. We are virtually the last people who do this, with the possible exception of Private Eye. It's not just a branding issue.
"The Economist is a kind of communal organisation in an odd way. People will file stories which sometimes we will change but we couldn't change something if that guy's name or woman's name appeared on it."
Micklethwait came to journalism from the City, having accepted a milk-round offer at Oxford to join Chase Manhattan bank. That job lasted two years. "I was not a terribly successful banker," he says. "But I think [City experience] means you understand some element of what business is about. For the past eight years I've written mainly about America but before that I wrote mostly about business and finance." Coverage of business and finance is the engine room of The Economist. "That's what drives us along. You can't feign interest in it; you are either interested or you're not."
The Economist and John Micklethwait are champions of globalisation. The editor-in-chief, a history graduate, questions whether large businesses really are more powerful than ever, noting that the East India Company had an army of 200,000.
He and his publication are scornful of the notion that companies should be obliged to put something back through corporate social responsibility schemes.
"We thought the implication of these things was that companies were somehow making dirty money. That BP's basic business was fiendish and the only way it could make itself better was to treat some people in Colombia slightly better. That still strikes me as fundamentally wrong."
In spite of this, promotion of The Economist in Britain this year will emphasise its coverage of diverse topics from the worlds of arts, science and culture.
Micklethwait claims his own credibility as a reader of American political runes has not been damaged by Democrat successes at the recent midterm elections. Those gains, he argues, resulted from "unimaginable incompetence" from the Bush Administration and a rightward lurch from the opposition.
With a smile, Micklethwait returns to editing the new year's edition, which is entitled "Happiness (and how to measure it)". The next biannual circulation figures will surely be an acceptable yardstick.
- INDEPENDENT
