I think the style could be preserved if the sourcing is done in the style you did here: an aside by the author separate from the main article.

It doesn't have to be paper style in the middle of the article, but it's good if it's present on the page (perhaps behind a button labeled "source disclosure" or similar)

I also think this increases the value I get from pieces like this, in more ways than whether or not my mind was changed. Sourcing might not influence mind changing in particular, but it'll help me if I want to dive deeper in the topic. Just yesterday I had trouble figuring out which paper was referred to by an economist piece by using google scholar queries- if there was a sources section, I'd have known instantly.

yes, good point. I am sure this has been discussed internally and not adopted to date for a good reason, but I will think on it more

I also don't see that sourcing as changing the minds of the untrusting, but as avoiding to lose the existing trust.

Does The Economist still have a statistics page at the back of the print magazine? It's been a while since I picked up the physical edition, but suppose we had a digital version of the magazine and you could footnote primary sources like you did in this thread and stash them at the end, after the stats summary.

it has one page of indicators in the back, yes. it would defo be too many sources to fit in print, but clearly digital makes this possible as a little clickable footnote at the bottom or similar. part of the issue is that one can't help but feel that you are competing with "attention apps", and so there's this deep incentive not to link out. my own view is that you can't succumb to this, and have to trust the reader with their own attention, but it is hard, still to push readers out of the site/app in any way

Well hold on a minute mate, this is an opportunity.

The draw of The Economist is that they are not the attention apps. The Economist could implement the most severe of editorial standards on select issues, wherein you do as I said upthread and bang the citation to a footnote at the bottom (or the last page in the print edition). The only readers who will "link out" are the people like me who you are talking to right now. Everyone else is going to see that the claim is footnoted and think "ah, of course The Economist footnoted this. It's The Economist".

I agree with you, and I hope we will go that way; free range organic high quality etc etc. but the lure of metrics affects our thinking too, in ways one cannot avoid wrestling with