I’m potentially blowing my chance at more freebies (I’m still reading “When the Lights Went Out“), but when organisations get in touch with me I tend to blog about the fact they’ve got in touch rather than covering the story straight. I don’t think this blog’s readers would care if I got paid to talk about something, but I know they’d rather I was upfront about it, and I think parroting press releases whoever they’re from is the last thing people want.

I don’t sell advertising space either. The simple reason for that is that the content is the product, even if there’s no price attached for you. When a blog sells advertising space then you are the product – access to you eyes is what’s being sold to advertisers. The content becomes little more than bait.

I refuse to be bait. But I’ve digressed. The point is that every now and again people do send me stuff. For example, today I was given a sneak preview of the Economist’s new advertising campaign, which I presume as gone live now, featuring a man taking a tour of a city via a network of tightropes. It’s quite cool – done by the same guy that made that free-running ident for BBC, dontchaknow, but that’s not what interests me.

What interests me is that the Economist itself is trying to grow and expand its readership – despite the recession, despite the doom and gloom surrounding print based media – and that new media is clearly important to them in trying to reach the ‘intellectually curious’. In other words, they’re doing exactly what everyone should be doing in difficult times: Trying harder – this goes down well in Gore Towers.

They’re hoping that because of the increase in numbers going to University there’s potentially another 3 million people out there that could be readers. I don’t imagine for a second they expect that kind of readership, but for a fleeting moment it feels like there’s a glimmer of hope for a fightback against fetishisation of … well… stupidity. Time for a bit of geek pride?

We’re here! We’re intellectually curious! Get used to it! I’d actually quite like to live in a world were listening to Radio 4 and reading magazines like the Economist wasn’t considered deviant for people like me, but then if it wasn’t I probably wouldn’t do it. Ho hum.

Whether the Economist’s New Media strategy goes beyond using political bloggers as a very direct way of reaching their target demographic to sell paper magazines or they can use their enthusiasm for liberal economics – and hunger for growth – to begin that all important migration to making the online content profitable remains to be seen. I’ll leave that sort of industry speculation to Guido, I think.