Happy birthday, OECD Observer!

The Rolling Stones aren’t the only ones celebrating 50 years.
November also marks the 50th anniversary of the OECD Observer, the award-winning public magazine of the OECD. The brainchild of Thorkil Kristensen, the first secretary general of the organisation, the OECD Observer was launched at the 2nd ministerial meeting 27-28 November 1962. He recruited a former war resistant and political journalist from his native Denmark, Anker Randsholt, to do the job. The audience? Busy policymakers who had no time “to read more than a fraction” of the OECD’s already considerable and somewhat technical work.
In those post-war decades divulging information to the public was a delicate exercise. Policy had inched forward in a Cold War atmosphere of confidentiality, not to mention paranoia. Today, information is currency, and as Kristensen wrote in the first editorial, by ensuring the OECD Observer was distributed at the 1962 ministerial meeting, “a step was taken towards a wider dissemination of this [organisation’s] knowledge.”
In effect, the OECD Observer became a public gateway to the work of the Organisation. Along the way it would fill other roles: a podium for laying out and discussing policy messages and unlocking tough ideas; an academic reference; and a rich and compelling archive.
Flicking through old issues is like taking a trip through modern history. From a heartfelt obituary for John F. Kennedy penned by Kristensen in December 1963 through the landing on the moon in 1969, the oil crisis of the early 1970s, privatisation in the 1980s, the information revolution and globalisation in the 1990s, to the economic crisis now: the OECD Observer captures the story of our times. Read more...