Prof Richard Baldwin has been editor of voxeu.orf for 18 years. He stepped down recently.
He shares his experiences and lessons from 18 years of editorship:
Since its launch in 2007, VoxEU has posted around 12,500 columns, written by about 10,500 authors, and viewed over 70 million times by over 25 million visitors. As its founding Editor-in-Chief Richard Baldwin steps down after 18 years, in this column he reflects on VoxEU’s role in connecting suppliers and consumers of policy-relevant research and how world events have ensured that the site matters more today than at its founding.
Lots of interesting insights.
When we started setting up VoxEU in 2006, the intention was to have a steady, daily fare of policy-relevant research. We went live in June 2007, and the world soon forced VoxEU to develop a second mode of operation: crisis response by leading economists. The forcing event was the Subprime Crisis of 2007 and the Global Financial Crisis it turned into in 2008.
The Subprime Crisis boosts VoxEU’s centrality.
In 2007, the US seemed to be having another one of its housing crises. Falling house prices and rising defaults were widely viewed as painful but manageable. This perception changed rapidly as did the profession’s thinking. You can follow it via the string of VoxEU columns (see, for example, the collection of crisis-linked columns selected by Andrew Felton and Carmen Reinhart and published as an eBook: The First Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century: Part 1 August 2007 -May 2008).
At first, few believed that these developments posed a serious threat to the global financial system. That did not last long. In July 2007, two Bear Stearns hedge funds heavily exposed to subprime mortgage securities collapsed. August brought widespread credit-rating downgrades and a sudden freezing of interbank markets, as banks lost confidence in each other’s balance sheets. Central banks were forced to inject emergency liquidity. In September, the run on Northern Rock in the UK made clear that the problems were no longer confined to the US. By the end of the year, it was called the Subprime Crisis.
Starting on 13 August 2007, VoxEU posted a slew of columns by economists who really knew what they were talking about and were willing to explain the crisis in terms that any trained economist could understand. There were based on facts, practices, and institutions that few other economists knew about at the time.
Newspapers’ limits (800 words written for the average newspaper reader) just did not work for an event of this complexity. VoxEU provided leading economists with the space to explain the situation using standard economic terminology. It raised the level of the public debate and this attracted academic researchers who had also been at the cutting edge of policy-making. The list is long and includes Willem Buiter (Professor at LSE and former member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee), Steve Cecchetti (Professor at Brandeis University and former Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the New York Fed), Charles Wyplosz (Professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and adviser to central banks), Marco Onado (Professor at Bocconi and former Commissioner of the Italian public authority responsible for regulating the Italian securities market, CONSOB), and Luigi Spaventa (Professor in Rome and former Chairman of CONSOB).
The gravitas and expertise such authors brought to their VoxEU column set the site apart from the rapid flow of commentary.
Mostly Economics 
