Magazines: Covering the Economist

For years, the reporting and commentary on international and British politics in the London Economist has been lucid, thoughtful, urbane and wryly detached. That spirit was hardly reflected on the cover, which, as with most British weeklies, merely offered some text and a partial table of contents. Nowadays the covers rank among the wittiest anywhere.

For its Christmas issue, the Economist portrayed Harold Wilson as a Santa Claus overjoyed because "I haven't got the sack." Other recent covers depicted Britain's "good and faithful" civil servants as so many goose eggs in bowler hats. To point up last week's summit meeting in Cierna, the Economist pictured Russia's Brezhnev and Czechoslovakia's Dubček exchanging chitchat while clapping perfunctorily at a public function. This week's cover on birth control is a portrait of Pope Paul sitting in lonely majesty against a black background. The caption: "What world?"

Responsible for the magazine's bright new look is Managing Editor Alastair Burnet, a former television newsman who took over the Economist three years ago at the age of 36. Together with Art Director Peter Dunbar, 39, Burnet plots out each cover as a "duet" of picture and caption. Burnet's intent is to attract new readers "in the younger categories." In his three years as M.E., circulation has increased by 45% to 100,000 copies a week.