Bill Emmott, The Economist July 21, 1998 I joined The Economist in 1980 through a strange and fortunate sequence of events. I had been studying as an undergraduate at Oxford, politics and economics. Toward the end of which I applied to every journalism job I could find and was ignored by all of them. I then applied to two magazines; The Economist and a magazine in London called the Investor's Chronicle. Someone advised me it was a good place to start. And surprisingly both of these actually were interested. I wrote some test articles for The Economist and had a lot of interviews at the Investor's Chronicle, neither of them actually gave me jobs but The Economists was the nicest to me. They said, "Sorry, we don't have a job at the moment, go away and do something else." So I did a postgraduate degree or started a postgraduate degree. I was studying for a Ph.D. in French politics on the French Communist Party. I went to Paris and had a nice time. And 18 months after I started it, just before I was about to pack my bags and come to Paris, The Economist got back in touch and said "well, we like what you are doing, how about coming for another set of interviews. We got a job in Brussels, in our office there for a trainee. We want somebody cheap and come and apply for it." I was somewhat surprised, dropped everything, applied for it and got the job. So that is the way it worked. I have worked for The Economist since 1980. I worked in Brussels for two years, and then I came back to London for a year and a half. Toward the end of which I was wanting to be a foreign correspondent again, wanting to travel and see places and a job came up in Tokyo for which I had absolutely no qualifications. I had never been East of Egypt. I have never spoken Japanese, had never read any Japanese nor read anything about Japan. But I noticed that my editor was finding it difficult to fill this job, couldn't find the right person. Finally, after a few weeks when I realized it wasn't being filled, I volunteered. They were slightly surprised, I was slightly young. But nevertheless they said, "Ok, we'll try you." So I was on a plane to Japan. I recall somebody who had been there, who is now an old friend of mine, my editor at the time, when he heard that I, then a 27 or 28-year-old who had been given the job over him, a 40 year-old, or whatever he was, he said he was disappointed to see that The Economist was now using the Tokyo job as a trainee job. So I went out to Japan. This was, in a way, the formative half of my career. I spent three years there as a correspondent in Tokyo during quite an exciting and interesting time in that the economy that was growing. They were getting rich investing abroad and so forth. And getting controversial in the U.S. because of trade fraudulence and so on. Toward the end of it, I decided I had a book coming through me. I wanted to write a contrarian book about, against a view that was becoming very current in the U.S. that Japan was a juggernaut steaming toward the rest of the world and was going to flatten everybody. And came back to London after two years of finance editor, which is what I had been appointed to, and convinced my editor to give me a sabbatical leave to go back to Japan and write this book. There is a book, and it is called, "The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan's Economic Power. I had the great good fortunate -- good luck is very important in publishing -- the great good that this book was published about a month before the Japanese stock market crash began. It was a negative, pessimistic view about Japan published in November 1989 and the stock market crash began in Japan on January 1, 1990. The book was translated into Japanese and became a best seller in Japan because it was the first book that was there to explain what was suddenly happening to the Japanese. It also did very well outside Japan. That then really shaped the next all the rest of my career up until now. One of the key things about The Economist, as you know, is it is anonymous. WE can talk about why it is later, probably. But what that means for journalists is it is very important to, while you're enjoying and appreciating the magazine, it is very important to establish some kind of identity for yourself outside it. And getting a book out there was a very important step for me to establish my brand, if you like, my name, my identity. To have something distinct from The Economist, distinct within The Economist, perhaps. My identity as a writer about Japan ahs latest ever since. But I also think it has provided some of the reputation and authority that eventually helped me become the editor. When I wrote that book I was finance editor at The Economist at the time. Then I promoted to run all of the back half of the paper in 1990, business finance at the time. I was managing a team of about 20 journalist in London and dealing with foreign correspondents overseas in the business/financial side. There was a second book about Japanese overseas investments comparing Japanese multinational companies with American wave of investments in the 1960s, which caused problems in Europe. That was called "Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invisible Japanese" and published in 1992.That carried on this separate identity while I was being at The Economist. Then in early 1993, my predecessor as editor suddenly resigned. He was plucked out of The Economist to a remarkable job being the deputy governor of The Bank of England. It was an extraordinary transformation from journalist to central banker. And so this job was available as the editor of The Economist. Nine of us applied, on the paper. There was no hierarchy at The Economist, very clearly. No sense of when one goes, the next guy steps in. It is very flat hierarchy. Nine of us applied and I got the job. So I became editor in March of 1993 and here I am still editor, coming on five years. Can I say a few things about The Economist? You probably know about it. But The Economist is 55 years old, started in 1943. It was a very small paper, really until the 1950s. We had quite a specialist, British merchant class readership. Some international readership, but really not very much. The international papers went to the extent that the British Empire and British trade meant that the interest was international, but it was basically a British paper. Still, beginning in the 1950's and accelerating to the early 1970s, we internationalized that paper. Actually, they internationalized it; it was before I joined. And we broaden the paper as well, particularly between the 1950-1960s away for being a business finance paper and towards writing about current affairs more generally and the basis, on the notion that everything is connected, that you shouldn't categorize business as one particular thing, and politics, economics and finance and technology are all on the same continuum. Really that extension began in the 1970s and moved away from a concentration on Britain, and more toward an international scope. We cut down on the British coverage substantially and expanded the international coverage and then technology admitting overseas printing with the satellite transmission of data really then helped us to expand our circulation because we could get copies to people much more quickly. Our circulation was probably around 100,000 in 1970 and then began a steady increase to the extent that it is now 700,000. Only 20 percent of that sale is in Britain. We are a very unusual publication in that our base is really a small part of what we are about. The circulation shows as well as the writing that about 14 percent in the U.S. with Canada having 45 percent. North America is really our dominate market. Twenty-five percent in Western Europe outside of Britain. And 12 percent in Asia. We are spread around the world. Student question: Inaudible BE: We have 65 journalist, 40 of whom are based in London. Roughly 20-25 based overseas. We have expected a steady expansion of these overseas bureaus as we have gotten wealthier but also as competition in international news and commentary ahs increased. We now have 15 foreign bureaus. Most recently I have been opening up bureaus in developing countries and merging markets. We opened in Mexico City, Johannesburg, in Brazil, in Beijing in the last couple years. Student question: Inaudible BE: We don't have an editorial board outside London. Each section of the magazine, Britain section, the Asian Section, the Arts and Books, the science section, each section has an editor. They keep their people and deal with correspondents and contributors and are responsible for laying out the pages. Above them, there are the department heads who put together the section for administrative or intellectually purpose. So the foreign editor above all of the foreign sections including the United States and the business editor is over the business sections. The output, the thinking of the section editors is channeled through the department heads and then the deputy editor and me. It is quite a flat hierarchy with a wide base. That is the way it works. Student question: Inaudible BE:On a Thursday morning, we get the final editing of the paper on page proofs. WE put the pages together on Wednesday and the layout and overnight the proofs are made. I get in at 6 a.m. on Thursday morning and my colleagues get in at 7:30 a.m. or 8 a.m. WE spend Thursday morning editing on proofs, reading the captions on the photographs. At the early part of the week when we are in the newsroom type environment when we are all seen together at 8 a.m., giggling and larking about what is going on, what we have on our pages and that sort of thing. But headlines are written on Wednesday but captions people write on page proof days on Thursday. The section editors write them and then all of the pages come through me. Sometimes I changed the captions if they are inappropriate in some way or I can think of something better or whatever. Student question: Inaudible BE: Yep, the way that magazines develop has been by continuous change, but never radical change. There is a continuous evolutions, we are always updating it bring in some new ideas, but not deciding to throw it out and start in a new direction. In 1993, I did page on statistics of emerging markets because I was increasing interest for people in developing countries. I introduced a page that half the time people hated the idea of. But it is now the most popular page in the paper, which is the obituary page. British people could not understand why I wanted to introduce death into The Economist. But actually, it is one of the most popular pages in the paper. It was part of an effort to increase the presence of people in the paper, in this case dead people. One thing about The Economist has a danger of being too abstract. WE are writing about aggregate trends in economics or politics. There is a danger that you never have any sense of humor put into that. So we introduced the obituary page, actually making it an interesting essay about somebody's contribution, that you had probably forgotten about. But also, I also introduced a business profile page that is called Face Value, with the same purpose, to reflect the people in business. I introduced a section on Latin American, called The Americas, which reflected what I saw in Latin America as a great interest, particularly in North America on Latin American. I introduced a monthly supplement on books called The Economist Review. At the same time as broadening the books section, pulling moreover because we could not agree on a single title for it to categorizing it. We wanted to have it quite eclectic. We introduced a column in the Europe section called???, which is intended to do for Europe what we did for Britain and the U.S. using an individual as a way to analyze certain trends and so on. Also, something through my editorial team was to begin to have a limited amount of editionalizing in the paper. A single global edition, that was identical worldwide, of The Economist for every country in the world. Whereas Time Magazine or Newsweek has very focused regional editions with different content. I made one move away from that. I decided the cut the Britain pages in the international edition, a number I was actually expanding in the U.K. edition. So we got up to 8-9 pages but we have enough to sustain and increase our impact in the British market, but cut back the British pages for overseas readers still actually probably slightly too many for our overseas readers interest. Student question: Inaudible BE: No, actually they've been there for some time. The politics one was introduced about year before I took over as editor. We put them together at the front of the paper. I guess the other thing we have done is go on the web and publishing on the company on the web in an unusual format publication, at least until recently, in that we charged for it. You have to pay for it, unless you are a print subscriber. If you a subscriber to the paper edition then you get it free. But we are not doing much with that. We are kind of waiting. Do I have any great new changes? No, I think again the future is going to be an incremental evolution. The thing I am working on at the moment is replacing our editorial system with a more modern one. Like many publications, we edit on a system that was basically designed in 1978 and has kind of been adopted over the period, but had not changed much really. The problem is the publishing system, until recently, hadn't been gotten ahead. At least from point of view of journalists and editors, they had improved the graphics and layouts but hadn't improved the basically the system. There is some new stuff out there and we are replacing the whole thing. At the same time we will change the way the paper is laid out between designers and editors. At the same time as introducing that, we are going to do a redesign of the paper to sharpen up and modernize the design and spread the use of central color to the paper. We are not going to put it into full color. One reason is because it is s great benefit to The Economist to be different and to emphasis a difference and being black and white is helpful. And we don't want to be participating in the gumming down of the publication. The fact that we are not in full color helps to maintain that the redesign in relation to it all. Secondly, that we produced the magazine on a newspaper schedule on Thursday and there is a hell of a lot of pages going around the world Thursday afternoon. To switch that to full color is very ?? to print on full color on our schedule with our printing machines. All of these factors together make it very ?? to do. We may go into full color in the next two or three years if printing technology develops but at the moment we aren't. Student question: Inaudible BE: I think it strengthens us. People are just swamped with information and it increases the need for an analyzer of the information. I think it puts pressure on us to make sure the information is accurate, timely, original in that it helps us in that, when you are surrounded with information you can't get away with having outdated stories about what is going on with China anymore in the way you could 10 years ago. A reader in San Francisco ten years ago would have been pretty indifferent with how up to date you were, how accurate you were.The ubiquity of information means that's no longer possible. We've got to increase the quality, we've got to emphasize analysis and interpretation rather than just raw information, which is why we've got foreign bureaus and are getting closer to the subject. Basically, it's increasingly the analysis and the interpretation, people want ways to find their way through the jungle of information that they've got. They can use electronic devices to do that, an intelligent agent of one kind or another to filter out what they want or they don't want. But actually, I think the bulk of people would rather have somebody in front of them doing all the filtering for them, saying, don't bother with all of that, just read this. I think strengthening, the need for us. I think that the news magazines like Time and Newsweek really have been affected by television more than by the Internet or modern technology. I think that the problem with the news magazines is that they can't decide whether they should be entertainment or interpretation and they're trying to compete on entertainment and they're unable to. You're on a losing battle with television if you're trying to compete on entertainment, on that kind of breed of analysis. There's a substantial readership forming and they probably don't have a good choice. Four million people in the U.S. say they want the sort of interpretation and analysis that we try to offer. We have 300,000 subscribers in the U.S., so there's a gap there between 300,000 and maybe we can grow to 700,000 or something, but we're still way below Time and Newsweek. Their circulation will be gradually falling as they as the do battle with television, I think. Student question: You mentioned Time and Newsweek quite a bit, but on an international scale, who would you say are your top three competitors? BE: From an editorial point of view, the right competitors to identify, in my point of view, are always the daily newspapers because if someone can get from (inaudible) everything that I provide, I would have to measure my value-added, my originality and my contribution at the Economist against what they are getting at daily papers. There's always an add-on purchase. Although newspaper circulations around the world are perhaps in a very slow decline, it is very slow and they have huge circulations compared to mine. I'm really an add-on purchase, so what I must measure myself against is what you're getting from your daily read to make sure you also want the Economist as your weekly read, to make sure that we are adding significant value to that. In terms of commercial competition, by which is meant really advertising dollars, the competition again varies region by region. In Europe, our main competition would be the International Times, Newsweek, Business Week, and then local publications, local magazines particularly. And then in the U.S., we're kind of a small creature in that arena, but I would say Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune and Forbes, really. News magazines and then some of the business magazines, business magazines because they have some of the demographics the Economist has a special position: oh, I read this and I'm stinking rich, I'm highly educated and international. There, our competition is with other publications that have stinking rich readers, Forbes in particular. Forbes has 800,000 stinking rich readers, we have 300,000, so that's there our key competition. In Asia, it would be Newsweek, Time, (inaudible) Economic Review, a regional publication, Asia Week, to some extent the Asian Wall Street Journal. So there's a group in each region that competing editorially. DA: I've been a subscriber to the Economist for I think 20 years and one thing I've always admired is something you mentioned, the value-added in terms of the information in the stories. Having read the New York Times every morning and then getting the Economist sometime on Monday and reading the piece about the same event that I've read two to four (inaudible) on and always being able to find, in addition to the interpretation, new information in that 500 words that you provided on it. Which leads to a question: In terms of an editorial manager, in terms of someone who is associated with hiring, how is it that the new information is obtained? What is the guidance given to correspondents and to contributors? Could you expand a little more on how the value-added is brought to the surface? BE: It's a terribly difficult thing to define. You know when it's not happening easier than knowing what to ask for. So it hard to define. Who do we look for, really? What kind of people do we look for for journalists? I mean, people have got to have an enormous curiosity, but also I look for several other ingredients. What is the ability to write across disciplines? I think that's often important in our articles. I don't like people who are just political writers or are just scientific writers or people who are just interested in business because that very often produces a narrow view and fails to understand the connection to people who are capable of and interested in crossing the frontiers, realizing there's a story about the German elections, we need to bring in some economics and an understanding of business as well as the politics. Thirdly, I think what we look for is an argumentative mind. Not just somebody who wants to go up there, find out what's going on, lay it out on a piece of paper, send it over and then go off to the restaurant or whatever. Somebody who wants to engage with the material, to argue with it, to think logically about it, to reject received wisdoms, and to try and make up their mind about what's really going on. It doesn't mean someone who's prejudiced or the worst people are people who are prejudiced, who ignore the facts and just write what they want. What you want is someone who is an interpreter, someone who is really genuinely trying to learn from what's going on, but also is trying to come up with an analytical opinion about it. And in doing so, I think you've got someone who's really analytical, argumentative about it, then they start to reveal and find all sorts of information that other newspapers have ignored. It also produces a more comparing story because it's not just a string of quotations, a string of sources. It's actually an attempt to reveal what the reporter actually thinks is going on and why and what you should do about it, what policies are involved. Actually, the point about quotations and sources is quite important in the Economist. The excellent American discipline of journalism emphasizes sources, emphasizes quotations, emphasizes the use of hard evidence to create the framework around which the story is built, and that has many virtues to it, but we reject it almost totally at the Economist. We don't like quotations because they're very often, we think, banal, and interrupt the flow of the writing. What we try to do is encourage the reporter to talk to hundreds of people, to take their views, but then to distill it into the report of their own view without interrupting it with saying ‘the economy is in a mess,' says Bill Emmott. We don't want that. We want our reporters to speak to these people, decide that the economy is a mess and then write in a straight line rather than building their article around a whole lot of sources that they've gone out and collected. That can be risky in that if you're not careful, the reporter might have made up their minds not to speak to anybody. But that's something that you police by knowing the people that are close to them, by testing what they've said through interrogation, really, by getting to understand how they're working and knowing if they have good sources for a story. That's a round-about, rambling way of describing it. I think that the argumentative nature is quite important. Of course, another important thing is that we're writing on a weekly routine, rather than a daily, which means that for most stories, we've got an extra day or an extra two days or an extra three days to think about it, to argue about it with each other, to put it together, to decide what's important and what's not important. Unlike if you're writing a daily story, particularly on a rolling basis, if you want to include something new, but you don't feel you can go over all the old material you can leave stuff out and each story is inadequate in themselves. It's only when you put them together that you see the whole picture and it's hard to do that in a daily paper. That's one of our advantages. Student question: (Inaudible) BE: Often on long train journeys I read big bundles of subscriber's comments on the back of subscription forms. We invite them to write their comments and they come to me after they've been processed. That criticism came up about 15 to 20 times in this great bundle and there's probably some truth to it and we should go against it. It's like the Jewish joke it's a joke only Jewish people can tell. What's the definition of being an anti-Semite? More rude about the Jews than is necessary. It's about the same as a Brit who can take quite a lot of criticism and turn it into a prejudice. I think it's a difficult balance. I think our (inaudible) readers tend to be over-sensitive about it. It tells about our view of the world. We do have a view about policy and politics which is quite anti-stated, it's liberalism in the 19th century English sense, and France is a huge exception to that and I think that probably increases beyond the normal level the number of pieces that seem anti-French because they are analyzing the sense that France grates against our view of the world. Now, ideally we should look at France and cherish the successes that are against our view because they're not only experiments in what's wrong with our view of the world, but also separate out the things that go wrong when (inaudible). But there's a danger I think with one of the things I have to fight against with my writers is because we're an opinionated paper with a consistent free- market, liberal view is that they'll come up with the notion that the easy way to please me is to write opinionated free-market views even if they're not followed through and are not appropriate, and so some people think that the no-brainer way to please the editor is to attack some protectionist (inaudible), and France is full of them. I think on the national caricatures and that sort of thing, I think we probably do a bit too much of that worldwide. Actually, we do do it worldwide, it's not just the French. We get a lot of complaints from the Japanese that certain times our cartoons are too caricatured, or Mexicans, too many of them are wearing sombreros. But it's hard to illustrate some stories without some sort of caricature. Not every German should be wearing lederhosen in a cartoon. We try to do these things without being offensive. DA: Speaking of the illustrations, could you speak a little about who does the drawings, when they're done in the process, how they've evolved. BE: We have basically a team of illustrators, none of them are employed fully by the paper. They're all freelancers. They essentially come in on Wednesdays during the period when we're putting the paper together, when the stories are almost written, and they work together with each section editor to come up with ideas about illustrations and what we try to do is to use a variety of illustrations, often using the same illustrator for a whole section. DA: It may be this illustrator is someone who's a little more jokey. BE: He's quite new, actually. We're sort of bringing him on board. A lot of illustrators, when they join us, aren't used to political cartooning. They're illustrators, but they aren't sort of attuned to political caricature, because actually there aren't that many outlets for it. It's a field dominated by a few people. Most of the work in illustrating is in illustrating more general books and magazines and so we tend to have to take general illustrators and nurture them in political cartooning, in sort of focusing the point of the cartoon. Our main caricaturist is now based in Baltimore, he's an American named Kevin Callaher. He has a nice story. He graduated from Harvard in a graphic design course and the first thing he did was going on a sight-seeing tour of the British isles. Two things happened then. One, he met the lady he eventually married, who's an Englishwoman. Secondly, he was a basketball player and was recruited to coach and play for a basketball team in Brighton as a professional. As you might imagine, basketball teams in Britain is not actually economically viable and this team soon collapsed. He was trying to raise money by doing portraits of people, tourists, at Picadilly Circus. And our art director was walking by one day, coming to the Economist and got talking to him and we invited him to come in on a try-out. He'd never done political cartooning before, so he came in and tried out and it began there and he was in Britain until the late '80s. He was based in Britain drawing for us as well as British papers and now he's the main cartoonist for the Baltimore-Sun. He does our caricatures, when we do Bill Clinton, it's usually him and he does all of them for the (inaudible) and the U.S. section. Every week, he does the (inaudible) caricature. He's really the only outside-Britain illustrator that we use. Otherwise we have a team of them. There's one particular national stereotype man, actually, who readers either love or hate. DA: How would you describe his style? BE: He does little sketches really. Student question: Going back to the idea of value-added, it seems like the Economist's core benefit that it provides to the reader is certainly its positioning among its competitors as an original, compelling evaluator of information and along those lines, I imagine that would create tremendous pressure to be original, and sometimes with that pressure to be original there's a possibility that something might not always be appropriate so I'm wondering how you balance that. And you talked about how you get the value- added, what kind of people can create the original information, but what is the process, is there a pow-wow among you before the story is even done? BE: Let me just start by broadening what I think is our selling proposition now. It is a combination of things, it's not just originality. It's that we're international, that makes us different. Almost all publications are actually domestic with an international add-on. The Wall Street Journal in the U.S. is basically a U.S. paper with some international news. Time in the U.S., basically a U.S. magazine with some international outlook. We sell a very global product. Secondly, we're not American, a very important part of our selling proposition. The fact that we're British is not very important compared with the fact that we're not American, so we're seen as being separate from the (inaudible). We also have a broader and more global view. We're not looking at things through an American prism all the time. Thirdly, the fact that we're interpretive and analytical about information. It's three things all together, I think. How do we go about things? Well, I think the fact that we're a very small shop is very important. It stretches people, it means that we're quite close to each other, cohesive and know each other well. Forty people in London, twenty-five people overseas, sixty-five people, that would be a third of the staff at Time or Newsweek, roughly. We argue and discuss a lot with each other. Foreign correspondents talk to each other a lot and talk to people in London a lot. Argumentation, discussion, is a very important part of what we do. I have an editorial meeting on Monday in London with all staff, and the purpose of this meeting is to have a routine sharing of what we're all doing, but principally to have discussions about our approach to stories, about our policy line, about our opinions about stories, a discussion in which the writer of an editorial or article feels they're going to have to defend their approach, their point of view in front of everybody, and that anyone in the room has the opportunity to say, that's nonsense, that's rubbish, have you thought of this, surely you should include that. A very open discussion. Clearly we can't discuss every article in the paper. People come to the meetings thinking that we might discuss their article in the meeting. We discuss virtually all the editorial pieces at the front of the paper to test the point of view that's being presented, to test whether it's the right approach, but also whether our recommendations or whether the IMF should lend $15 billion to Russia or not, whether it's properly thought through and to take into account all the possible counter- arguments. It's a very interrogatory process that then produces quite a dispirited culture throughout the paper. People spend a lot of time in corridors arguing about things. I think that is the key part of what we do, that we're not sort of patronistic journalists who sit in their rooms reading their stories which then get published. We are people who feel that arguing with one another, defending our views to one another, cooperating to some extent, that's helped by being anonymous. Being anonymous has two benefits. One, it enables us to take consistent points of view. It doesn't just mean laying down ideological points, it means avoiding saying Russia shouldn't be supported one week and then saying the next week that it should. Because we're anonymous, it gives consistency and it also makes the writers feel obliged to make their own views consistent with the paper because they're writing under the name of the Economist, not their own name. Secondly, it encourages cooperation. People feel less protective about their individual articles, more likely to take criticism, more likely to take somebody else's input. They're proud of what they do and particularly enjoy writing. It just breaks down that barrier a little bit. It suppresses the natural egomania that we all have. I think the danger is that people stretch to far, even to the point of inventing stories, like recently at the New Republic. A journalist at the New Republic was found to be inventing his stories and that is a danger in journalism. He was extremely inventive and was finally caught up because he wrote a story about a company and to reinforce the story, he actually set up the company's web site himself and on the web site posted articles attacking his own article in the New Republic, so he introduced (inaudible). Then someone at the New Republic went through all his previous articles and when he checked them he found that huge amounts of them were invented. We had a guy who did that like 10 years ago. Student question: What is the gender ratio of your staff? BE: I haven't got the numbers. I would guess it's probably 60/40, 60 percent male, 40 percent female. I could be exaggerating, it could be 65/35, but it's roughly that sort of thing. Among senior editors, the U.S. editor is a woman, the economics editor is a woman, the surveys editor is a woman. The editor of the (inaudible) pages is a woman she happens to be my wife, so that shouldn't count, in a way. There are probably one or two others as well. Student question: (Inaudible). BE: I don't know that either, actually. It must be pretty high. I guess 75 percent maybe. I guess another way to answer that is to ask how many are non- British. We have a quite heavy American contingent in our staff. I have sort of blinders as to what people's C.V.'s are. I mean, you looked at them when you hired them, but now I sort of forget people's backgrounds. I guess 30 percent are non-British maybe. One or two may be Rhodes scholars or something. DA: One last question. What is it that you know today at the craft of being an editor that you wish you had known when you began? BE: Oh, God, a most difficult question. I don't know really. I think the important thing to understand is that it isn't how much you know. As a journalist, you should doubt, you should be skeptical, you should never assume you know a lot about a subject. You should always be continually re-looking at the source. That's something I didn't know when I started off. I knew very little but we rather assumed that quite quickly you got to know stuff and then you didn't really need to re-examine it. I guess if you're looking for some single point, it's the continuing question, not only about received wisdom about what's going on, why things are happening, what the right explanation is, what's going to happen in the future, but also you have to continually question your views. I think that's the important thing, to try and keep reminding yourself to question what you're thinking.