Robert Cottrell is deputy editor of Economist.com, in charge of innovation at The Economist newspaper's popular website.
He is also a veteran foreign correspondent with more than 20 years' service in Hong Kong, Japan, Europe and Russia, for The Economist, The Independent of London, and the Financial Times.
He began his career with the Financial Times in London, where he wrote the diary column, “Observer”, which in those less politically-correct days was called “Men and Matters”. He was posted to Hong Kong in 1982, and covered the two years of negotiations leading up to the treaty between Britain and China which provided for the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. His book on the subject, “The End of Hong Kong”, was published by John Murray. He went on to work for the Financial Times in Japan, before returning to Hong Kong as regional financial correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
In 1993 he joined The Economist, first as features editor in London, then as bureau chief in Moscow, where he covered the wild early days of Russian capitalism from the controversial privatisations of 1995 to the onset of the Russian financial crisis in 1998. He moved to Brussels as The Economist’s European Union correspondent, and was the main author of The Economist’s alternative “constitution for the European Union”, published on October 26th 2000, widely applauded for its clarity and its brevity.
Missing Moscow, Robert accepted an invitation from the Financial Times to return there for two years as bureau chief, from 2001-2003.
From 2003-2006 he was Central Europe correspondent of The Economist, covering the new and future member-states of the European Union from the Baltics to the Balkans. His survey of European Union enlargement, “When East Meets West”, appeared in The Economist of November 2003.
He is now based in New York and is deputy editor of Economist.com, and in charge of innovation.
An early champion of internet journalism, he won a London Press Club award for his online reporting from Afghanistan for the Financial Times in 2001.
For the past decade he has written regularly on Russia for the New York Review of Books. He is currently working now on a book about extreme risks.
His knowledge of Moscow, and of Brussels, and of the countries in between, enables him to speak and write with authority about all aspects of European Union enlargement, and about the future course of relations between the European Union and Russia. He has contributed to the New York Review of Books, on Russia and on Russian foreign policy, since 1996. His papers have been published by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Centre for European Reform in London. He has co-authored two books on EU enlargement for the Economist Intelligence Unit. He moderated the dinner-debate on Russia at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.