The second long-term effect plays to our strength: the big effect of the Internet and the multiplication of television sources is that people are more and more swamped by information. So although news cycles are short and information is ubiquitous, there's a growing role for providing analysis and helping the public better comprehend all this information, because they don't have the time to filter and assess it themselves. There's a market for analysis providers like The Economist, which grows stronger precisely because of technological change.

Finally, the Internet, as a publishing medium, has affected us to the extent that we feel our readers would like us to publish there on a frequency that is more than weekly. We now publish "rolling analysis" for example, that is updated daily and deals with global issues.

Web sites are now a fairly standard companion to print media. Are Internet versions of a publication viewed as complementary or threatening to the magazine? How have perceptions of the electronic media's role changed?

They are very much a complement. Many publications made mistakes by rushing to spend so much money on and to throw so many people at their web sites because they were running ahead of the reader. Readers have not, first of all, moved to reading on the Internet as fast as many expected--in fact, it's been quite a slow transition. But secondly, people seem to be using the Internet for purposes different from those for which they use a newspaper or magazine. They use it for instant news, but also for reference, research, and search tools. The simple way to put it is that "print only" is no longer a viable option because readers expect electronic availability. In the end, it doesn't matter to us whether people read electronically or in print, but at the moment it feels as though people still want primarily print media, with electronic media as a supplement.

You mentioned that with the proliferation of news sources, people want a single source that not only informs them of the news but also offers analysis or commentary. What are the responsibilities accompanying this sort of value-added content?

First of all, value-added content is an absolutely basic function of editors and always has been--this isn't a new phenomenon. The reason people bought newspapers has always been a combination of finding out facts and paying editors to sort the facts for them; it's an absolutely perennial issue. Secondly, it's important that the analysis is rigorous and done in a coherent way according to a consistent, methodological approach and a set of principles so that the reader can know what kind of analysis to expect--a sort of helpful frame for the reader. If over time this analysis proves to be done well and in good faith, readers will continue to pay us to do so. My job is to ensure that this happens. It's a matter of choosing the right staff, but most crucially of engendering a collegiate atmosphere in which we discuss our stories, debate topics, and assess one another's ideas.

One of the features which has marked your tenure at The Economist has been an expanded focus on developing countries. How has the media's scope of coverage changed in recent years?

Coverage has become more globalized; we are much likelier now to have in-depth coverage of Brazil, South Africa, or Southeast Asia. That reflects the globalizing trend in the world economy and increasing engagement with developing countries or emerging markets that our readers in Europe and America have.

Clearly, technology has also increased substantially in our coverage because the world is going through a long-term technological revolution and we want to explain it, analyze it, and try to get a feel for its effects. We've carried many more long survey articles on the genome, the new economy, and the relationship between technology and economic growth, for example, which we wouldn't have been carrying 10 years ago.

Near the end of the recent prolonged US presidential election, The Economist took a chance by running a cover declaring George W. Bush's victory before this had in fact been confirmed. This proved to be accurate, but have there been any notable instances in which predictions have gone awry?

The thing about predictions is that you have to make them. Some of them, however, are inevitably going to be wrong, perhaps simply because you assessed the factors incorrectly. I wrote a piece last year about all our predictions that had gone wrong entitled "We Was Wrong," which sought to analyze why predictions go wrong and why we continue to make them. The biggest missed prediction of last year concerned oil prices. At the time, oil prices had been consistently falling, even below US$10 a barrel, and we published a piece speculating on the potential impact of prices below US$5 a barrel. It turned from a "what if" piece into a predictive piece, speculating that this probably would happen. We published this on a Friday, and the following Tuesday there was an OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] meeting at which, in response to the increasingly difficult situation in oil markets for all the producers, they agreed to cut production quite radically, and prices suddenly rose. Very soon afterward, oil prices had doubled, and by the end of the year, they had tripled. Our US$5 a barrel prediction looked more and more wrong as the price went beyond US$30 a barrel. I think it did make us look a bit silly, but it was made in good faith, and the reasoning behind the prediction was laid out in detail so that people could read it and draw the opposite conclusion from the facts if they wished to. Clearly, I wish we'd been right, but this doesn't stop me from thinking that we should make similar forecasts in the future. That is part of analysis--you have to judge where things are heading.

Another case that is more interestingly on the border was over the war in Kosovo when we, along with many other publications, criticized NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] for its bombing of Kosovo. We had a cover whose headline was "Stumbling Into War" and we argued that NATO should send in ground troops rather than just bombing. As it turns out, NATO succeeded and Milosevic eventually left power; in that sense, we were wrong, but I think it was a fair and reasonable judgement at the time. We tried to assess the risks, and the balance of risks were against success; indeed many military people thought as we did. On the basis of the situation at the time, it would've been better to also prepare ground troops, so we can be both right and wrong. Hindsight says that the risky strategy worked, but that doesn't imply that we were wrong in pointing out that the strategy was risky and that an alternative strategy might have been better.