The Economist: maintaining the "niche" in a digital world

An interesting profile by Charlie Beckett,Director of POLIS, the journalism think tank at the London School of Economics, starts our week in digital journalism.

He details the working practices of Edward Lucas (pictured), the Central and East European Correspondent for the leviathan that is The Economist.

(This blogger can also personally comment that Lucas is a funny and charming writer that I have had the pleasure of drinking a foul spirit called Becherovka with, in a bar in Prague, getting to enjoy a tale of journalistic misadventure that shall be herein referred to as “The KGB meets ‘Winnie the Pooh’”).

Beckett writes how The Economist is always looking to build its substantial ‘niche’ as the compact, intelligent, authoritative, liberal package of analysis and reportage for the Globatariat as it tackles the challenges of technological development, such as the impending addition of wifi on aeroplanes.

Lucas, says Beckett, is: “a natural and inveterate blogger who understands the new media environment acutely.”

“The media business is becoming more rational,” Lucas tells him. “There is too much duplication and the institutional cross-subsidies for news are disappearing.”

Lucas has used this online nous to both provide more in-depth content to his stories, as well as injecting humour to try and lessen that feeling that reading The Economist is a bit like “homework”. Hence, says Beckett, his very amusing animation of a map of Europe, a piece of Fantasy Cartography that suggests geo-politics could be improved by moving the countries around.

Lucas has also used online network to “mine the expertise of his readers”. He has a network of contacts that he uses to test out ideas and gather feedback from, as well as regularly communicate with those that comment on the website or email him personally.

So (to abuse the classroom metaphor further) perhaps the lesson to be taken from this is to look at a textbook example of how a top journalist makes the transition from print to an incorporation of online content and do likewise?