[jonshea]

Very interesting. I’m glad that you pointed out that the Economist is “anonymous”. (If you haven’t noticed, almost all Economist articles are published without a byline). It’s a quirk I’ve never been convinced that they adequately justify. One of my favorite gags is to claim that I write for the Economist? Don’t believe me? I challenge you to prove that I don’t.

[bertil]

It has little to do with anonymity (although it's close to ‘Anonymous‘ approach): they do it to force journalists of the “factual” part of the magazine to accept that they are part of a redaction; see: http://www.economist.com/about/about_economist.cfm That “lack of by-line” allows them to have a tone and yet, not be the Opinion pages; it seems to work.

They have a public list of their journalists (or at least, their work): http://www.economist.com/mediadirectory/books.cfm and staff can publicly say they work there.

A friend of mine works there (or interns, not sure); she post on Facebook and twitter the papers that she wrote, or the video that she shot, but she also includes other papers that she really liked. I'm assuming the official policy is stricter, but what she does is rather implicit, that only a handful of people notice (and presumably mostly other journalists that help with her ‘beat‘). So far, she has defended, sincerely, every paper that I criticized (I go after The Economist a lot) — most of them quite far from her beat (I'm closer to the Economist's line when it comes to the topics that she covers).

[papaf]

I went to a talk by a part time science writer for the Economist. She is a Scientist and this shows because the science pieces in the Economist are as good as the fluffy stuff in the front of Nature.

I think the anonymity allows people, who are experts in their field, to be candid but protect their reputation.