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Lunchtime meeting with Edward McBride, Business Editor at The Economist,
on February 9 2010
Report by Simone Selzer, Penrose Financial
It was a very interesting event, with a good turnout of PRs from both agency and in house - Kamal Ahmed, Business Editor at The Sunday Telegraph and Paul Lewis of Radio Four's Money Box are also lined-up amongst others to attend in the next couple of months.
Overall points to bear in mind when pitching to The Economist:
- There is a split between the business and financial pages - e.g. a story on investing falls into finance, not business
- There are 1.1m readers, of which 700,000 are based in the US - 2/3 of The Economist's readership is therefore based outside the UK, so stories really do have to be global (even some of the biggest British business stories don't make it into the business pages)
- There are only seven pages per week in the business section and therefore space is extremely limited
- Reporters are willing and interested to go out to meet industry players
- Reporters at The Economist really do not like quote checking however there is no house rule against it
- Once a topic has been covered they are reluctant to revisit it again for a few months, as least unless there has been a huge change - Edward gave the example of having written about Toyota, covering the problems in detail, before Christmas so will only now write about them again because of the unprecedented level of interest currently
- The business team has around 10 reporters based in the UK and then dedicated business reporters in a few other key locations: Hong Kong, Japan, India, Germany, New York, Sao Paulo
The working week:
- The best day to pitch a story to a reporter is on a Friday afternoon, the reporter can then pitch to their editor on Monday morning - email is best and then a follow-up phone call if you haven’t heard and feel that you have a very strong story
- Monday morning - main weekly meeting in which weekend's news is reviewed and main stories/briefings are determined
- Wednesday - stories lined-up and in the afternoon, it's edited and paginated
- Thursday - the issue is proofed and finalised (only really huge stories will be considered at this point)
- Front page story ideas are considered the previous Friday for the following week
Areas of interest for the business section:
- Corporate governance (for listed companies)
- CEO pay
- Key influencers who get little press coverage e.g. SaudiAramCo, the world's largest oil company was mentioned as an example
- Surveys and research - although only if they illustrate a global trend
Special reports and video slots:
- These are dealt with by the Special Reports editor and copy is filed 4/5 weeks in advance of publication
- The video slots are dealt with by the Online Editors - they are in embryonic stages and so it is not really possible to pitch for these yet