How we chose this week’s image
The last few days of putting together the features for the end-of-year double issue are always a scramble. This year they fill 57 pages in the print edition. That is an awful lot of fact-checking, proof-reading and illustration-perfecting. My co-editor, Robert Guest, and I started putting the issue together in May, when the first email went out soliciting pitches from our journalists. So the rush might seem baffling. But it happens every year, no matter how organised we are and no matter how far in advance we plan.
Often that is no one’s fault. The reporting for these kinds of stories can be tricky. For a story on jobs in the Arctic, getting there was the first hurdle. The first mine our correspondent tried to go to was in Svalbard, but it is Russian-run with Ukrainian workers and the security situation is such that visiting proved impossible. The second was in Alaska. The town where the offices were located got flooded so all flights were cancelled and hotel rooms were filled with displaced residents. The third, which she managed to get to, is an exploration camp which may actually be illegal but at last provided excellent copy.
A story about sex—and why researchers know so little about a subject that so many people spend so much time thinking about—raised different kinds of issues. One was that sex is difficult to illustrate. We wanted pictures that were suggestive but a little vague, capturing the argument that much remains unknown about human sexual behaviour. WanJin Kim’s pencil drawings are beautiful but an early draft was too mysterious—indeed, some editors thought they saw things in it that the artist never intended and that The Economist could not possibly publish. Fortunately WanJin made some careful adjustments, yielding the elegant final version above.
The Economist is known for its charts. Readers can rely on them being elegant and easy to understand. The biggest chart in this Christmas issue is, arguably, simple, at least in design—and it is certainly beautiful. But it also shows everything that exists and has ever existed in the entire universe. Which is…less than straightforward. But the sheer awesomeness of what it depicts is undeniable.
Even as correspondents put enormous effort into producing these special features, the news doesn’t stop. Wendell Steavenson has been writing extraordinary stories about the wars in both Ukraine and Gaza for 1843, our sister publication, for months. It was not easy for her to find time to walk through Japan for a week for a piece about Paul Salopek’s efforts to retrace humankind’s journey out of Africa. She was also only able to bring a small bag, “no more than 5-6kg”, according to Mr Salopek’s recommendation. The lightness of her pack may have been a relief walking in Japan’s hottest summer on record. Fortunately, Mr Salopek also stopped frequently to let her recover in the air-conditioned oases of Japan’s convenience stores.
The Christmas issue is also a chance for our journalists to demonstrate their shamelessness. Witness that of a sushi-loving correspondent who managed to come up with a story about the greatest fish market in the world, in Japan. Obviously he had to go there to write about it. Look, too, at the name of the fictional airline in the delightful diagram that accompanies a story about the afterlife of retired planes. See if you can work out who on our staff wrote it.
As the year draws to a close, the news shows no signs of slowing down. But I hope that you will get a chance to do so and enjoy the exuberance of stories our journalists have produced.
