http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/347509756

The Economist

Established in 1843 to campaign on one of the great political issues of the day, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. Though the protectionist Corn Laws which inspired Wilson to start The Economist were repealed in 1846, the newspaper has lived on, never abandoning its commitment to the classical 19th-century Liberal ideas of its founder. For most of its existence The Economist has been content with a small circulation. When Bagehot gave up as editor, it stood at 3,700, and by 1920 had climbed to only 6,000. After the second world war, it rose rapidly, but from a base of barely 18,000, and when Crowther left it stood at only 55,000, not reaching 100,000 until 1970. Today circulation is over 1.4m, more than four-fifths of it outside Britain. The American circulation accounts for over half of the total. 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. - Publisher.

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