The Economist

I’ve been busy with a lot of things which is why posting has been slow none existent for a while. It’s a combination of work – big changes at the University; the Meld thing I’ve been involved with and starting to take the research thing a bit more seriously.

In that vein I was down in London at The Economist with a very smart guy called Brendan Greeley. He dropped me an email asking if he could pick my brain and I asked him If I could interview him for my research in return. I think I got the better end of the deal on that one.

I think there may be some really good stuff coming out of the Economist in terms of multimedia but, sensibly, I think there is a lot internal discussion and thought going on to just what it will be.

These guys know a lot about who their audience is and I like the way they treat them. Who else would lavish something like Intelligent Life on them. As a magazine you could say it has pretentions and its an almost obscenely nice physical object. But the web site is a great example of the value of relevant, interesting content over design. Even better than that it also values and promotes its reader interaction.