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Great article although I'm not sure this is the case for this book list

> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

This was written in April 2005. Turns out they figured out how, we call them influencers and firms pay them. Easy peasy. Also these mostly moved on social media instead of maintaining blogs.

Andrew Keen wrote a book on this in 2007 called The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture.

I didn't agree with him on the copyright stuff (I loved Napster, pirate bay, sharing etc), but he was right on most of his points.

Readers of Private Eye regularly get to read about what the magazine calls "log rolling".

It turns out in a lot of christmas book lists - especially lists that solicit book recommendations from famous writers and journalists - are absolutely crammed with recommendations for their friends' books, their co-workers' books, their boss's wife's books, books by authors they share a literary agent or publisher with, and so on.

Are you suggesting all these books’ publishers or authors might have paid to be on the list? It’s such a vast and varied list that it seems like a bizarre conclusion. Or do you think they’re paid to raise awareness of books in general? Is The Economist in the pocket of Big Book?
Don't mean to speak on behalf of OP, but yes, no, yes, and yes.
So how would we distinguish a paid-for article about best books of 2023 from a non-paid one? Would we conclude everything is above board only if there’s no such article at all?

Seems like a claim that’s bordering on unfalsifiable…

It's not varied. The economist has a political bent and the list has a bit of this too.
A pro-free market book but also a few critical of climate change and Big Tech; an anti-Evangelical but also an anti-woke one. Some critical of China but others critical of Japan and South Korea, etc. I’d argue that there’s at least an attempt to cover a variety of viewpoints.

But your argument is different from the OP’s. Their argument seems to be that the article is paid for by the publishing industry, while yours is that the newspaper in question has a political bent.

yeah the political bent isn't a dealbreaker for me, they're not kidding about it, have what I'd call a painfully plain mainstream view on most things, and at least attempt to, most of the time, examine both sides of an issue before picking a side (which will obviously be the free market one). fairly deep looks with standard UK middlebrow takes
Maybe the PR side is to keep book lists constantly in the news. Also not too sure about OP point.
I don't understand on what you base this accusation / whataboutism. The Economist is widely considered a very balanced (though opinionated), high quality source of news and coverage. FWIW throughout its coverage it is very careful to disclose any potential conflict of interest, as also in the book list (for example where a recommended book is written by a current or former writer for the Economist or published by an affiliated company). For myself, and I guess many readers of HN, the Economist's annual book list is one of the best sources available for learning about new books. No wonder this made it to the front page.
great read, thanks for sharing