Resist me Less

A recent editor, Rupert Pennant-Rea, once described The Economist as “a Friday viewspaper, where the readers, with higher than average incomes, better than average minds but with less than average time, can test their opinions against ours. We try to tell the world about the world, to persuade the expert and reach the amateur, with an injection of opinion and argument.” With readers such as these, and aims such as these, The Economist was bound to find it progressively harder to increase its circulation in Britain. That became especially true in the 1960s and 1970s, when British daily papers started to carry more of the interpretive, argumentative and analytical articles that had traditionally been the preserve of the weeklies. The Economist has survived, and indeed prospered, by building on the internationalism of its outlook and by selling abroad.