User:Aqw96/sandbox

As of March 2014, the Economist Group declared operating profit of £59m. The publication has described itself as "a product of the Caledonian liberalism of Adam Smith and David Hume." It targets highly educated readers and claims an audience containing many influential executives and policy-makers. The newspaper's CEO described this recent global change, which was first noticed in the 1990s and accelerated in the beginning of the 21st century, as a "new age of Mass Intelligence."

Opinions
The Economist generally supports free trade, globalisation, and free immigration. Activist and journalist George Monbiot has described it as neo-liberal while occasionally accepting the propositions of Keynesian economics where deemed more "reasonable". The news magazine favours a carbon tax to fight global warming. According to former editor Bill Emmott, "the Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative". Individual contributors take diverse views. The Economist favours the support, via central banks, of banks and other important corporations. This principle can (in a much more limited form) be traced back to Walter Bagehot, the third editor of The Economist, who argued that the Bank of England should support major banks that got into difficulties. Karl Marx deemed The Economist the "European organ" of "the aristocracy of finance".

The paper has also supported liberal causes on social issues such as recognition of gay marriages, legalisation of drugs, criticizes the U.S. tax model in a recent issue, and seems to support some government regulation on health issues, such as smoking in public,  as well as bans on spanking children. The Economist consistently favours guest worker programs, parental choice of school, and amnesties and once published an "obituary" of God. The Economist also has a long record of supporting gun control.

The Economist has endorsed both the Labour Party (in 2005) and the Conservative Party (in 2010 and 2015) at general election time in Britain, and both Republican and Democratic candidates in the United States. Economist.com puts its stance this way:

The Economist frequently accuses figures and countries of corruption or dishonesty. In recent years, for example, it criticised former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz; Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister (who dubbed it The Ecommunist); Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the late president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Robert Mugabe, the head of government in Zimbabwe; and, recently, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president of Argentina. The Economist also called for Bill Clinton's impeachment and, after the emergence of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Though The Economist initially gave vigorous support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it later called the operation "bungled from the start" and criticised the "almost criminal negligence" of the Bush Administration's handling of the war, while maintaining,, that pulling out in the short term would be irresponsible. In the 2004 U.S. election, the editors "reluctantly" backed John Kerry. In the 2008 U.S. election the newsmagazine endorsed Barack Obama, while using the election eve issue's front cover to promote his candidacy. In the 2012 U.S. election, Barack Obama was again endorsed: the editorial said that they preferred Obama on the economy, foreign policy and health care, but criticised him for running a negative campaign against Romney and for a "poor appreciation of commerce".

Tone and voice
Though it has many individual columns, by tradition and current practice the magazine ensures a uniform voice—aided by the anonymity of writers—throughout its pages, as if most articles were written by a single author, which may be perceived to display dry, understated wit, and precise use of language.

The paper's treatment of economics presumes a working familiarity with fundamental concepts of classical economics. For instance, it does not explain terms like invisible hand, macroeconomics, or demand curve, and may take just six or seven words to explain the theory of comparative advantage. Articles involving economics do not presume any formal training on the part of the reader and aim to be accessible to the educated layman. The newsmagazine usually does not translate short French (and German) quotes or phrases. It does describe the business or nature of even well-known entities, writing, for example, "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank".

Many articles include some witticism; image captions are often humorous puns and the letters section usually concludes with an odd or light-hearted letter. These efforts at humour have sometimes had a mixed reception. For example, the cover of 20 September 2003 issue, headlined by a story on the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancún, featured a cactus giving the middle finger. Readers sent both positive and negative letters in response.

Circulation
Each of The Economist issue's official date range is from Saturday to the following Friday. In the UK print copies are dispatched late Thursday, for Friday delivery to retail outlets and subscribers. Elsewhere, retail outlets and subscribers receive their copies on Friday or Saturday (as of May 2014, Monday in Europe), depending on their location. The Economist posts each week's new content online at approximately 2100 Thursday evening UK time, ahead of the official publication date.

In 1877, the newspaper's circulation was 3,700. In 1920, it had risen to 6,000. Circulation increased rapidly after 1945, reaching 100,000 by 1970.

Circulation is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). From around 30,000 in 1960 it has risen to near 1 million by 2000 and by 2012 to about 1.5 million. Sales inside North America were in 2007 around 54 percent of the total, with sales in the UK making up 14 percent of the total and continental Europe 19 percent. The Economist claims sales, both by subscription and at newsagents, in over 200 countries. Of its American readers, two out of three make more than $100,000 a year.

The Economist once boasted about its limited circulation. In the early 1990s it used the slogan "The Economist – not read by millions of people". "Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few," wrote Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor.

The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group. The publications of the group include the CFO brand family as well as the annual The World in..., the lifestyle bimonthly Intelligent Life, European Voice, and Roll Call. Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of the company from 1972 to 1989.

Letters
The Economist frequently receives letters from senior businesspeople, politicians, ambassadors, and from spokespeople for various government departments, non-governmental organisations and lobbies. Well written or witty responses from anyone are considered, and controversial issues frequently produce a torrent of letters. For example, the survey of corporate social responsibility, published January 2005, produced largely critical letters from Oxfam, the World Food Programme, United Nations Global Compact, the Chairman of BT Group, an ex-Director of Shell and the UK Institute of Directors.

Many of the letters published are critical of its stance or commentary. After The Economist ran a critique of Amnesty International and human rights in general in its issue dated 24 March 2007, its letters page ran a vibrant reply from Amnesty, as well as several other letters in support of the organisation, including one from the head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Rebuttals from officials within regimes such as the Singapore government are routinely printed, to comply with local right-of-reply laws without compromising editorial independence.

It is extremely rare for any comment by The Economist to appear alongside any published letter. Letters published in the newsmagazine are typically between 150 and 200 words long (and begin with the ritual salutation "Sir"). Previous to a change in procedure, all responses to on-line articles were usually published in "The Inbox". Comments can now be made directly under each article.

Features


The Economist's primary focus is world events, politics and business, but it also runs regular sections on science and technology as well as books and the arts. Approximately every two weeks, the publication includes an in-depth special report. (previously called surveys) on a given topic. The five main categories are Countries and Regions, Business, Finance and Economics, Science and Technology, and Other. Every three months, it publishes a technology report called Technology Quarterly or TQ, a special section focusing on recent trends and developments in science and technology.

Since July 2007, there has also been a complete audio edition of the news-magazine available 9pm London time on Thursdays. The audio version of The Economist is produced by the production company Talking Issues. The company records the full text of the news-magazine in mp3 format, including the extra pages in the UK edition. The weekly 130 MB download is free for subscribers and available for a fee for non-subscribers.

The publication's writers adopt a tight style that seeks to include the maximum amount of information in a limited space. Atlantic Monthly publisher David G. Bradley described the formula as "a consistent world view expressed, consistently, in tight and engaging prose".

There is a section of economic statistics. Tables such as employment statistics are published each week and there are special statistical features too. It is unique among British weeklies in providing authoritative coverage of official statistics and its rankings of international statistics have been decisive. In addition, The Economist is known for its Big Mac Index, which it first published in 1986, which uses the price of the hamburger in different countries as an informal measure of the purchasing power of currencies.

The publication runs several opinion columns whose names reflect their topic:
 * Analects (China) — named after The Analects, a collection of Confucian sayings, this column was established in February 2012.
 * Bagehot (Britain) — named for Walter Bagehot, 19th-century British constitutional expert and early editor of The Economist. From July 2010 until June 2012 it was written by David Rennie. From July 2015 it has been written by Jeremy Cliffe.
 * Bello (Latin America) - named for Andrés Bello, a diplomat, poet, legislator and philosopher, who lived and worked in Chile. The column was established in January 2014 and is written by Michael Reid.
 * Charlemagne (Europe) — named for Charlemagne, Emperor of the Frankish Empire. It is written by Tom Nuttall.
 * Lexington (United States) — named for Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. From June 2010 until May 2012 it was written by Peter David, until his death in a car accident.
 * Buttonwood (Finance) — named for the buttonwood tree where early Wall Street traders gathered. Until September 2006 this was available only as an on-line column, but it is now included in the print edition. It is written by Philip Coggan.
 * Banyan (Asia) — named for the banyan tree, this column was established in April 2009 and focuses on various issues across the Asian continent, and is written by Dominic Ziegler.
 * Baobab (Africa & Middle East) — named for the baobab tree, this column was established in July 2010 and focuses on various issues across the African continent.
 * Babbage (Technology) — named for the inventor Charles Babbage, this column was established in March 2010 and focuses on various technology related issues.
 * Prospero (Books and arts) — named after the character from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, this column reviews books and focuses on arts-related issues.
 * Game Theory (Sport) — named after the science of predicting outcomes in a certain situation this column focuses on "sports major and minor" and "the politics, economics, science and statistics of the games we play and watch".
 * Schumpeter (Business) — named for the economist Joseph Schumpeter, this column was established on September 2009 and is written by Adrian Wooldridge.

Other regular features include:


 * Face Value about prominent people in the business world
 * Free Exchange a general economics column, frequently based on academic research, replaced the column Economics Focus on January 2012
 * An obituary. Since 1997 it is written by Ann Wroe.
 * sections on science and the arts

The news magazine goes to press on Thursdays, between 6pm and 7pm GMT, and is available on newsstands in many countries the next day. It is printed at seven sites around the world. Known on their website as "This week's print edition", it is available online, albeit with only the first five viewed articles being free (and available to subscribers only mid-October 2009 – 2010).

"The Economist" published in 2015 its first U.S. college rankings, focused on comparable economical advantages defined as 'the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much its students subsequently earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere'. Based on set of strict criteria sourced from U.S. Department of Education ('College Scorecard") with relevant 'expected earnings' and multiple statistics applied in calculation of 'median earnings' conclusive evaluation method has been applied to ran the scorecard’s earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a common method of measuring the relationships between variables.

The Economist also produces the annual The World in [Year] publication. It also sponsors a writing award.

Innovation Awards
The Economist sponsors the yearly "Economist Innovation Awards", in the categories of bioscience, computing and communications, energy and the environment, social and economic innovation, business-process innovation, consumer products, and a special "no boundaries" category. The awards have been held since 2002. Nominations are held between 2 and 30 April. The award ceremony is then hosted on 15 November. Choices are based off the following factors:


 * How much revenue their innovation has made their company or its economic impact on a specific good cause or society in general
 * The effect their work has had on the marketplace (or if it's created a whole new marketplace altogether)
 * The impact their innovation has had on a new type of science or technology

Writing prize
In 1999, The Economist organized a global futurist writing competition, The World in 2050. Co-sponsored by Royal Dutch/Shell, the competition included a first prize of US $20,000 and publication in The Economist's annual flagship publication, The World In. Over 3,000 entries from around the world were submitted via a website set up for the purpose and at various Royal Dutch Shell offices worldwide.

The judging panel included Bill Emmott, Esther Dyson, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart (then-chairman of Royal Dutch Shell), and Matt Ridley (a British scientist and member of the House of Lords).

Censorship
Sections of The Economist criticising authoritarian regimes are frequently removed from the magazine by the authorities in those countries. The Economist regularly has difficulties with the ruling party of Singapore (the People's Action Party), which had successfully sued it, in a Singaporean court, for libel.

The Economist, like many other publications, is subjected to censorship in India whenever it depicts a map of Kashmir. The maps are stamped by Indian Customs officials as being "neither correct, nor authentic". Issues are sometimes delayed, but not stopped or seized.

On 15 June 2006, Iran banned the sale of The Economist when it published a map labelling the Persian Gulf simply as "Gulf"—a choice that derives its political significance from the Persian Gulf naming dispute.

In a separate incident, the government of Zimbabwe went further and imprisoned The Economist's correspondent there, Andrew Meldrum. The government charged him with violating a statute on "publishing untruth" for writing that a woman was decapitated by supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front party. The decapitation claim was retracted and allegedly fabricated by the woman's husband. The correspondent was later acquitted, only to receive a deportation order.

On 19 August 2013, The Economist disclosed that the Missouri Department of Corrections had censored its 29 June issue. According to the letter sent by the Department, prisoners were not allowed to receive the issue because "1. it constitutes a threat to the security or discipline of the institution; 2. may facilitate or encourage criminal activity; or 3. may interfere with the rehabilitation of an offender".

Criticism, accusation and praise
In 1991, James Fallows argued in The Washington Post that The Economist used editorial lines that contradicted the news stories they purported to highlight. In 1999, Andrew Sullivan complained in the New Republic that it uses "marketing genius" to make up for deficiencies in analysis and original reporting, resulting in "a kind of Reader's Digest" for America's corporate elite. Although he acknowledged that the magazine's claim about the dotcom bubble bursting would probably be accurate in the long run (the bubble burst in the US market two years later), Sullivan pointed out that the magazine greatly exaggerated the danger the US economy was in after the Dow Jones fell to 7,400 during the 1998 Labor Day weekend. He also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College. The Guardian wrote that "its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation".

In 2008, former editor of Newsweek Jon Meacham, a self-described "fan", criticised The Economist′s focus on analysis over original reporting.

In 2012, The Economist was accused of hacking into the computer of Bangladesh Supreme Court Justice Mohammed Nizamul Huq, leading to his resignation as the chairman of the International Crimes Tribunal. The magazine denied the accusations.

In 2014, the magazine withdrew a harshly-criticised review of a book by Edward Baptist on slavery and American capitalism; The Economist had complained that "[a]lmost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains." Baptist attributed the harsh review to the magazine's adherence to "free-market fundamentalist" theories, "the idea that everything would be better if measured first and last by its efficiency at producing profit."

Praise and accolades
In 2005, the Chicago Tribune named it the best English-language magazine noting its strength in international reporting "where it does not feel moved to cover a faraway land only at a time of unmitigated disaster" and that it kept a wall between its reporting and its more conservative editorial policies.

As the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on 31 January 2016, Bill Gates confessed to reading The Economist "from cover to cover every week".