The Economist Subscribers to The Economist, listen up.
The following sentence contains three egregious violations of The Economist's style guide.
The style guide is our House Bible on how to write.
Over 200 pages of commandments on grammar, spelling and felicitous phrasing.
First published as a book in 1986 and maintained by our in-house Solomon's of style.
I'll tell you the transgressions in that sentence at the end of this episode.
But if you didn't spot them, don't worry, you're not alone.
Our journalists frequently fail to follow the style guide too.
Editors spend ungodly amounts of time correcting infractions.
And that is a problem AI ought to be able to help with.
So I wanted to have kind of a little tool.
You click on an extension, like a Chrome extension.
And then that opens up a series of AI tools, like, for example, style checking.
You'll remember my colleague, Ludwig Siegeler, from episode one.
He's a veteran tech reporter at The Economist,
and lately he's been put in charge of rolling out generative AI tools in our newsroom.
An automated style checker that journalists can run on their own copy is one of the items on Ludwig's wish list.
But getting time in our developer's schedule is easier said than done.
The first time I asked for it was a year ago and of course that got postponed
because there were always different priorities and there was some miscommunication.