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写在前面
《经济学人》年终特刊制作过程充满挑战与趣事。从北极采矿到性行为研究，记者们克服重重困难完成报道。插图设计需要巧妙平衡，既要吸引眼球又不失品味。一张图表竟囊括宇宙万物！即便在战地报道繁忙之际，记者们仍坚持完成特刊任务。有趣的是，记者们还巧妙地将个人兴趣融入报道中。这期特刊展现了记者们的敬业精神和创意才华，值得一读。
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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.
