The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market.
Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements?
PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue.
PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times---worth paying for---although they have gone so broad recently that I'm worried they're becoming unfocused, trying to appeal to too many at once.
I would not put the NYT in the same league as The Economist.
The NYT used to be a quality publication, but recently has been going down hill, fast (recent fiasco with quickly edited extremely one-sided article on Ellen Pao's verdict, etc)
I have been a subscriber to The Economist for 25 years now, and while I don't always agree with their opinions, their articles are unquestionably well researched - and beautifully written (and often tongue-in-cheek, British-style).
The job the Times has is at least an order of magnitude harder than the Economist.
I enjoy reading the Economist, but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay.
AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker.
The Economist has a writing style where they present the 'facts' that make their case but never state the uncertainty over those facts. It makes their articles look really persuasive until you do your own research at which point they look really, really shaky.
The New Yorker has a sterling reputation what it comes to copy editing, not sure if they have the same reputation regarding fact checking. The New Yorker isn't a destination for me though whereas the Economist most certainly is one of the few sites I will directly type into the URL bar in a browser, I buy their end-of-year year in review religiously, I am neither politically nor economically aligned with them but they cover the shit that matters most in a timely fashion with their ideology in plain sight.
The New York Times has great writers but it is incredibly biased even though it pretends to be impartial -- really it is only a notch up from Pravda and whatever that mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party is called. There have been numerous scandals over the past decades involving journalistic integrity. It is telling that Snowden's revelation broke in the Grauniad (as Private Eye nicknamed it) and the WashPo (dunno). Journalism is in an _amusing_ place right now what with Al Jazeera (in English!), Russia Today, The Intercept, and others. Don't know where I'd class the BBC News.
Economist is the only publication i pay for. I'm not sure how many newspapers/magazines could really follow suit. There is only so many high quality sources anyone can read, its a small niche I think. Also the average economist reader is probably quite high on income so I suspect thats a skews their ability to charge
Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay.
We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads.
The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
– Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
We call ourselves hackers and innovators. Yet instead of pouring our energies into figuring alternative business models and micropayment solutions, we spend our energies on more ways to capture users in viral schemes and then collect their data for sale to advertisers.
As I wrote the other day: Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.
I'd say you overestimate the number of people working on ad-supported software. Many, if not most of us are working on for-pay software and services.
The reason I'm ambivalent about ads is not because it funds my paycheck (it doesn't, we charge for our services), but because for all their evils, ads work as a kind of enforced redistribution mechanism, and since geographic adjustments of prices work poorly on the web, I fear that any kind of payment system will inevitably lead to prices being set at the US middle class income level, shutting out everyone with a lower income level.
I know can afford to pay for stuff, and I'm happy to do it, but that's only been true since I started working, and only because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job.
I suppose "we'll figure it out" is one answer, but I'm afraid I can't put my heart behind a proposal that would have left my teenager self closed off from most of the web.
Imagine a world, pre-internet, where almost all books are handed out free, but with their pages loaded with ads, and their stories embedded with "native" ads and product placements. Imagine that book "stores" get a cut of the ad revenue and so are incented to stock and push whatever book titles "clicked" the most and contained the most ads?
Authors in this world would say they have no choice, because readers will always choose the free book over the $10 or even $5 book. The bookstores only stock the free books for the same reason.
In that world you would make exactly the same argument that you just made to me.
I'm glad you work on non ad-supported software. But look at it from a consumption, share of revenue and availability perspective: ad supported software is eating the web.
And in that world, I would have been able to read a lot of books that I wish I could have when I was growing up, when I only got 3-4 books per year, plus access to a poorly stocked library.
Would I have traded? Yes, I probably would have.
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I also don't agree that one must oppose all advertising or none; we can oppose native ads and personal tracking without being necessarily opposed to well demarcated side ads.
> The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.
What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN who would rather see ads than pay for stuff.
With all due respect I don't think you have been paying attention as much as I. Anti-ad sentiment on HN as well as elsewhere has only been on the rise in the past few months. But all you have to do is go back in my comment history a ways and you can see all the flack I get, though you won't see all the down-votes I got (a lot!).
Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively recently, after an earlier period where Apple got bashed by many simply for being ahead of the mainstream.
The HN type of audience has been bashing Flash pretty aggressively for at least 15 years, certainly it was a common refrain that could be relied on for easy upvotes back in Slashdot's heyday.
Looking at this thread, it looks like we run into problems because we jump to solutions quickly, then thoroughly waste our time debating them.
Perhaps we'll have greater success if we can first agree on common ground?
There's a fundamental force at play here that extends far beyond the internet. I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Attention and mind share can be bought. This causes some weird outcomes in the Internet and politics.
It has to do with how we obtain/exchange value in our society - speech, information, material goods, attention, justice, etc. Perhaps how we make people produce value: labour, creation, votes.
Could we get closer to a solution if we spent more time understanding the root cause?
We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking.
Nick's logic (which I'd arrived at independently, though years later) is solid. He's known for some fairly impressive ideas, some of which I disagree with.
Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For numerous reasons.
Individually assessing the purchase validity of ever smaller quantities of content simply doesn't pan out. Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns, rather more so.
Micropayments are the media payment plan of the future, and always will be.
1. Nick wrote this in 1999 and he's been proven wrong. For example when Apple proposed selling music tracks for 99¢ and he probably would have used this very argument and pooh-poohed them along with everyone else.
2. His arguments are one of an anal accountant. Do you know what fraction of the population even reviews their monthly credit card statement, their long distance phone charges, whether or not their mobile data plan minutes are being counted accurately, or whether their iTunes charges matches the number of songs they download exactly? A very small fraction. Do we need to? No, not all of us. We can trust that if a vendor violates trust and commits fraud, someone will catch it and they will suffer a class-action lawsuit, as does actually happen.
3. "Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns" can work great if the amount I pay per month is fixed, and that fixed payment is apportioned among the things I consumed in a way that rewards quality. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960. This is just a simple idea by me, an amateur.
Back to "impossibles":
- If before Wikipedia existed, someone proposed to create an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could anonymously edit, that it be funded by donations and that it become the encyclopedia that most people refer to, nearly 100% of us would have rolled on the floor and laughed out loud.
- If before it existed someone described a magical currency with the properties of what we now call Bitcoin, most would have said, "yeah right".
- If before asymmetric public-private key encryption was invented, someone said we needed a way to communicate where one side could decrypt something sent by the other but not be able to do the reverse and thereby pose as the other, most would have said, "good luck."
Please, please stop speaking in absolutes. It comes off as rather arrogant and foolish rhetoric.
Since you mention Apple/iTunes: I'd argue that it's the rule-proving exception. Yes, Apple's managed to implement micropayments with a music service based on 1) bog uniform pricing (99¢ no matter what — though that's changed since, no?), and for a fairly standard product for which previews and sampling are readily available in many cases — that is, the buyer has a very good idea of what they're buying in most cases.
And yet... there are numerous alternatives which aren't Apple: streaming music services (a bundled, non-micropayments model, either pre-paid or adverts supported), YouTube (adverts). Frankly, I've largely gotten out of the music-buying habit, though I'll pick up a CD occasionally at a show.
Your points on statement review largely make my point: if the idea of micropayments is to make people rational consumers of content, then if they're failing to review and assess their purchase habits, they simply aren't rational consumers. Which is to say, the premise of micropayments is false.
For long distance, he specifically addresses the case: the cost of attributing billing costs was itself a huge portion of the cost of service itself. By moving to flat pricing you can at once reduce costs and reduce customer anxiety over service use. I've been on flat-fee pay-as-you-go comms plans for years now. For what I'm paying, it literally isn't worth the telco's time to compute costs.
The kitty payment method is pretty much precisely how music broadcast and public performance (think bars, restaurants, stores) payments work. You've got a few licensing agencies (ASCAP, Harry Fox), playtime measurement (logs from radio stations and the services providing streams to retail establishments), and artists are cut a check based on plays.
Various checks and balances keep everything reasonably honest. Performance licenses are held by establishments and not performers -- it's the nightclub owner, not the band, who's on the hook for the fee. That greatly simplifies logistics -- on the spectrum of unreliable characters, bar owners rate higher than drummers, or even front-men. Shenanigans by the licensing agencies can be pursued by class-actions among musicians (not to say they can't or don't get screwed, but there are some checks). And the end consumer of the music (bar / nightclub / restaurant / store patron) doesn't worry about any of this at all.
The whole "rewarding quality" is something to consider, though I'll note that Apple dispensed with this entirely at least initially: everything cost the same amount. I can see (and have made) arguments to why this shouldn't be the case (high-quality scientific research or investigative journalism strikes me as more worthwhile than algorithmically generated tone patterns). And I'm not pretending to have a solution fully worked out. But I'm almost certain it lies in the direction of aggregated, not disaggregated, payments. Broadband tax. Syndication fee. General funds tax. Patronage to creators. Something like that.
As for Wikipedia: it follows patterns of collaborative work which date back centuries (review some of the early history of dictionaries and encyclopedias).
Bitcoin's got numerous problems, of which scaling is one. Trust another.
PKI's roots trace back to at least 1874 and William Stanley Jevons, who's just become even more interesting in my estimation. The primary limitation, aside from successful algorithms, was cheap and ubiquitous computing. As that came online, first for institutions and governments, later for individuals.
I'm not aware of any significant discussion that PKI was impossible. One-way functions have been known for centuries. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's work postdated national security implementations of PKI by British GCHQ by only three years.
Discussion of absolutes is risky, but there are a few.
I challenge you to exceed 300,000 km/s.
Others similarly exist in various fields, including social and economic ones. Part of the basis for my own statements is Gresham's Law, which I'm coming to view as a fundamental and principle limitation for economics. Others would include the Law of Diminishing Returns, and variations of the maximum power principle (Darwin-Lotke energy law, White's Law).
$1/week is a lot for what a single author could put out. If you take into account time researching, I can't imagine that would amount to more an article per week at any kind of quality?
Let's say you have 40k readers and 50/50 overhead vs writers. So, 40k people pay 1$ and get to read the output from ~10 writers. Now, get another ~2k people to sign up and that just about covers another author assuming your overhead does not increase.
Clearly, you can play with these numbers with various assumptions and readerships. But, the point is you can scale things down with paid subscribers.
Thanks for the reminder that I need to start using that on the way to work instead of the usual NPR or fluffy podcast. What little I've listened to it, it is quality, I just forget that I have it.
I was a subscriber for 4 years and I can confirm that the Economist is crap. It looks good compared to other choices like 'Times' or 'Newsweek' which are totally unreadable.
* It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the economist.
* You never know the author. You never know the actual author's background so reading between the lines is (in the beginning at least) hard
* It has it's own view of economics, which most of the times is miles apart from the academia: If I had to choose between 'Buttonwood'[1] and Paul Krugman, I'd go with Krugman any day of the week. Having different opinion is one thing, diverting from mainstream academia views CONSTANTLY on 101 macro-economics is another.
* The Economist is extremely PRO-WAR. There is NOT ONE instance that I recall the economist NOT backing a war: Afghanistan, Iraq... Latest one was Syria. The magazine's editor, openly called for the USA to attack Syria. The article (main article btw) was awful and brutal.
Are there any good articles in there? Of course. There are many good articles featuring in the Economist. But overall it's not nearly as good and fair as most people think it is.
I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally.
Generally speaking I found "The New Yorker" to be the best[2] magazine so far. I think part of the reason is that it's not on the spotlight so much, as the 'Economist' and the authors receive less pressure to push a specific agenda.
[2] When I say 'best' in this context I mean avoiding 'double standards' giving everyone a voice and so on. For example check out the articles on Wikileaks, Assange, Snowden or any controversial figure in the Economist vs New Yorker. The New Yorker features interviews, articles and views from both parties, not only from the US gov. The Economist on the other hand even when it tries to be fair to someone, uses diminutive terms like "unorthodox", "unconventional", "self-proclaimed", etc. That's not journalism, that's manipulation. The worst form of manipulation.
Your comment simply says that your politics don't align with The Economist's.
I personally find the "he said, she said" style of reporting that purports to give a fair account of all sides intolerable and hypocritical. It often allows complete idiots to air their opinions in the name of presenting a "different" view. This lets the reporter subtly influence the reader while preserving the illusion of impartiality.
The Economist is a highly biased newspaper. Unlike nearly all other publications aspiring to high-brow status, it displays its biases openly.
My main complaint with the Economist (as a subscriber) is that it doesn't display it's biases openly - it often presents controversial economic or social positions as settled fact in a neutral style. If you didn't know the subject it was writing on you would think they were presenting the orthodox position.
If you didn't catch The Economist's biases on a cursory reading of one issue, that's on you. Simply skimming one of the leader opinion pieces and comparing it to, e.g., a Krugman column, should tell you that the authors would come to blows.
I'm not talking about their overall world view I'm talking about their "Coffee growing in Guatamala" or "Cement production in the far east" articles - the ones where they are providing information on a relatively obscure subject. The articles present very matter of fact tones when in reality they are often reporting on one side of genuinely contraversial issues.
>>Your comment simply says that your politics don't align with The Economist's.
May I enquire as to your stance on the corn laws?
>>it displays its biases openly.
Nope. It claims to speak from the perspective of economists but instead is pushing a panglosian, unilateral free trade agenda. The world view has many internal contradictions (OP notes their treatment of good and evil countries, China is for some reason in the good category despite working hard to disrupt US hegemony while other countries that verbally protest are labeled evil), I can only assume they have sinister motives or are mentally retarded. Much like Fox News.
> It often allows complete idiots to air their opinions in the name of presenting a "different" view.
There, you just described the economist.
Okay, jokes apart... My 'problem' is that most mainstream media, doesn't consider the economist biased. I didn't consider the economist biased in the past. When I did, I stopped my subscription because it had nothing to offer: I knew beforehand what am I going to read on (almost) any given situation.
Well, the Economist is a newspaper with an officially non-neutral stance. I can hardly view it "the worst form of manipulation" when it's not different from every blog and personal column ever in this sense.
As to the Iraq war, it might have been the case that they supported the invasion right at the beginning (someone could point me to links), but since the casus belli turned out to be bogus I can't remember reading anything but denunciation of the war from the Economist.
Yeah, but since the casus belli was ALWAYS OBVIOUSLY bogus, that's on them. Saddam held the world dicatatorship record for "number of times deterred as a rational actor after a little brinksmanship". He could have had the keys to the Russian arsenal and still not nuked anybody. Someone can say, with integrity, that they thought Iraq was a good strategic decision aside from the WMD nonsense, and can even say with integrity that they still think it was. Saying "Oh, I believed the intelligence and thought he was an imminent threat" is admitting up front that you can't read past the first 5 words of a headline.
> "I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally."
I'd concur with this. Even though I disagreed with some of the articles I found them to be well written/edited and I'd learn about different viewpoints (so I subscribed). They even published a style guide. I don't recall when but I started to feel that they (ironically) stopped following their own style guide and around the same time the quality began to drop.
I recall it being far more balanced prior to the Bush administration. They had a viewpoint: pro-free trade, and generally pro-civil-rights. You could reasonably disagree with the pro-free trade stance.
Then, in the mid-naughts, I recall begin shocked as they started to run epic essays begging Karl Rove to attempt to rise above politics as usual, and about how Texas represented the future of the world. Completely off the rails.
I fear The Economist may be one of the only examples of how for-pay content can work. (Not curated, their content is original.) I'd love to know more about how well it's working for The Economist, too, is there anything public about their financials?
Haha you're absolutely right about the cardboard insert! With any other publication that comes to my house, I can easily rip the insert out. I have to be extremely careful not to de-staple the entire issue of The Economist when removing that awful insert.
> The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market.
It certainly is. But I wonder how much their strategy can really serve as a model for others.
On the one hand, the Economist might be seen as saying, "Here is how to do it." Others can follow and similarly prosper, with increasingly large markets being served.
Or, on the other hand, the Economist might simply be meeting all of the demand for a publication like itself. And the only way for another company to do as well using the same strategy, would be to produce a publication that is convincingly better than the Economist, thus putting the original out of business.
I'm starting to sour a bit on NYT. I do feel that The New Yorker and London Review of Books are both very good examples, however - paid content that is very, very well done and worthwhile.
I agree. I'd go further and say that the NY Times is the world's best English-language newspaper, with the possible exception of the Financial Times. I think much of the criticism comes from two issues:
1) Newspaper journalism is very hard; look at how much new research (i.e., almost everything they publish outside the editorial page) they publish every day; they're going to get a few things wrong and make a few errors in judgment. However, name a paper that does this job better.
2) The ideological right-wing, trendy in some places (e.g., News Corp publications such as Fox News and the Wall St Journal), in their effort to discredit any source of information for their followers but themselves, have tried to politicize the NY Times. After all, the NY Times prints facts, and those are always a threat to any ideology.
That said, some errors, such as during the leaup to the Iraq War, are inexcusable (but what papers did better?[1]). They're the best, but they could improve a lot.
[1] I think the one answer might be McClatchy's (a leading owner of local papers) DC bureau. Highly recommended for their courage on unpopular questions and for their integrity. A very underappreciated resource: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/
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The Economist and NY Times do two different jobs. The Economist provides analysis; the NY Times generates and presents new knowledge (i.e., journalism), essentially for you to do your own analysis.
For example, the NY Times researches and breaks the story on NSA wiretapping; the Economist provides context and analysis of it (think about it: Have you ever seen the Economist break a story?). The NY Times interviews the head of the NSA, telecommunications companies, privacy adocates, etc. and provides their responses to you. The Economist summarizes and analyszes the responses (think about it: how often do you see quotes in the Economist?).
I'm not criticizing one or the other; both have their place. My perspective: The Economist approach is more efficient (someone does the analysis for you) but is more prone to bias (e.g., they apply their free market ideology everywhere). The Times approach is essential (someone has to create the new knowledge) and less prone to bias, but you need to read a lot more to understand the same story.
> Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, which has had a non-controlling 50% stake in us since 1928, is selling. Three-fifths of those shares will go to an existing shareholder—Exor, the holding company of the Agnelli family. The rest will be bought back by our parent company, The Economist Group.
Phew, I was really worried they were selling to News Corp or something when I saw the headline. I've often thought of the Economist as the weekly version of FT, but the two are actually quite independent from each other (both in editorial control and legal control). Pearson had a 50% stake in the Economist but only 6/13 board seats. And the Economist has been great about fiercely guarding its editorial independence.
My sentiments exactly. It is a breath of fresh air to see a company depart from a huge multinational like Pearson. Somehow I wasn't aware that Pearson had a stake in the Economist and I frequent "Who Owns What" http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php.
Now that I know I'm not subsidizing Pearson with my subscription, I'll be even happier to renew.
> Phew, I was really worried they were selling to News Corp or something when I saw the headline.
I am more wary of one of those greasy-activist-investor types coming into the picture and demanding the publication "does more for the investors", i.e. more Kardashian-style (garbage) news.
News Corp biases its companies in favor of News Corp. The Economist has always been the hallmark of an independent newspaper that published a consistent of opinions in line with reality.
And I don't think anyone reasonable believes Fox is anything but a Conservatives-centric news network that plays out the News Corp official line in all situations.
The Economist does in fact have a marked and explicit editorial mission to promote free trade principles, set forth in their Prospectus[1], specifically, that "ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country", and "POPULAR MOVEMENTS: A report and account of all popular movements throughout the country in favour of Free Trade."
Unlike some organisations (e.g., NewsCorp), these biases are at least explicitly stated, if not widely known.
While I generally respect it, I find its skew at times quite painful to swallow. At least the writing is generally well executed.
That's the most recent? Just in July there were supposedly part of a giant plan with the MPAA to slander Google to manipulate stock prices. It's amazing anyone takes NewsCorp seriously.
My life has changed for the better since subscribing to the Economist in 2011. For me, it's not about paying for content (which is great) but for the 'feeling of being informed'.
After reading each issue I feel informed about what is going on around the world. This has sparked many conversations with people from around the world.
I hope that following this transition that 'feeling of being informed' will not go away and I have no reason to suspect it would.
If only I had local and regional news at such a calibre...
I subscribed to the economist sometime in the middle of 2012 and did not have a positive experience.
I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.
I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts.
The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a political interpretation that you can't realistically argue with unless you are an expert in the some very niche domain. This leads to many people in my field (finance) having strong opinions on an impossible variety of subjects which ultimately boils down to parroting the economist. The culture of "lying with statistics" comes to mind.
I realize many of these problems are inherent in journalism but the economist relies more than others on being opaquely unimpeachable. Reading the economist felt less like a dialog and more like "believe us or appear uninformed in public."
>I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.
Contrarian to what? It follows the Washington Consensus pretty much religiously.
It also came out in favor of George Bush and the Iraq war in the beginning (when everybody else was) and against them after (when everybody else was also).
Sticking to the theme of US elections, it also came out for Barack Obama in 2012. That's pretty contrarian considering The Economists history and Mitt Romney's policies on Wall Street.
The vast majority of economist articles can be summed up as "you thought it was that way, but it's actually this way."
I was subscribed to the economist for several years, and unsubscribed once I figured out that much of their content on non-western countries is either heavily tinted, or outright false.
The economist is very good at providing readers with the illusion of being informed.
Think about how multifaceted US policy is on any given day of the year. The economist boils down similar issues to a blurb on a page with a heading that says "middle east." So now you can turn that page and be confident that for this week you know what's going on in the middle east.
The truth is the economist fills a void. Before reading an issue you know nothing about current events in India. After reading you know something. Something is vastly more power than confessing ignorance in any situation. And if anyone questions you, well, the economist said so.
Of course you won't learn much about a country from reading a single article about it in the relevant section of a weekly newspaper. But if you read it regularly, you'll read numerous articles about that country over the course of a year - probably more than 50 in the case of a moderately powerful and dynamic country like India. Over time you'll realize that some predictions made in the articles pan out, some don't, some is consequential, some not and so on.
Reading a single issue will not make you well-informed; at most it will provide you with something to chat about at a cocktail party (if you're the sort of person who likes to chat about the news) or a point of reference if you meet someone from a foreign country and want to ask a topical question.
I've found that reading over time is advantageous, not because one collects more and more trivia about more and more places (although that's true) but because the more important themes emerge of their own accord most of the time. By this is I mean that one tends to become aware of major issues long before they rise to the top of the 24 hour news cycle.
...per week. I highly doubt their goal is to inform you on all current events in the region in a single week. But it's a weekly and over time a reader would develop a cursory understanding of events across the region (they also briefly touch on the highlights in the "The World This Week").
I think they're assuming their readers will know how to dig further on events they find relevant. Personally I find The Economist pairs well with a subscription to Foreign Affairs.
This year, I read an article in The Economist where they endorsed the opposition candidate (Buhari) for the upcoming Presidential election in Nigeria. The article stated that Buhari had thrice contested before and lost the presidential elections and each time accepted the verdict. But that turned out to be false (and the comments in the article said so but Economist did not update the article). Each time Buhari lost the election, he challenged the results (as he had a right to) all the way to the Supreme Court.
ISTM you're both right. To challenge election results all the way up to a country's Supreme Court, if one has the right to do so, is to accept the institutional verdict on the outcome while disputing the initial outcome (of the vote count). In many developing countries, unwanted election results are followed by rioting, coup attempts, or highly public sulks and political maneuvering often enough that it's a problem for stability.
Mounting a challenge within an institutional or constitutional framework is qualitatively different - it puts the rule of law above pure power politics.
In general I agree. I stopped reading the economist since they often approach stories as if they only have 1 or 2 sides. I would rather read more nuanced long articles on fewer issues.
There is a sort of sophmoric danger zone WRT being informed on any issue. Sometimes you can be informed enough to discuss something, but lack a proper nuanced understanding from multiple sides.
I'm fickle when it comes to magazines, but I still love reading them. My latest infatuation is Harpers. However, in their latest issue they wrote a medium length piece on something in my area of expertise, and kinda did a poor job of it. This makes me question the quality of their other pieces on subjects that I am less familiar with.
I have some formal training in economics, but not enough to call myself an economist. However, even I can see that the economist performs their economic narrative generation a bit too neatly. They leave out nuance in favor of length.
I do agree that the economist is a bit sneaky like that, I think the latter part of your post is spot on. But I do feel that it's not at ALL a contrarian news source.
I coincidentally also subscribed to the Economist in 2011 and I can relate to the feeling of being informed. However I had to cancel my subscription in 2013 for lack of time. After a while, I could never finish an issue. To be honest I have regretted my decision and I now feed on lesser quality news from "free" sources.
It really is a great publication but I couldn't justify the spending or the piling up of issues. I might go back this year, been thinking about it.
I did the same - subscribed in 2007 and cancelled it in 2012. And I am here in minority but I cancelled it BECAUSE of its content. The barrage of anti China news, anti India news, and then the lack of any standing on any issue except free market. Economist consistently backtracks on everything if it somehow results in more free market. It is why it was established in the first place so why complain? The height was when they published an article saying how Iran is against hezbollah but two issues later they said Iran must stop supporting hezbollah. Then they once went on for several weeks about chinese government's crackdown on prostitution and how it is fomenting dissent. Then a train crashed and again they went harping about how dissent was just around the corner. Moving out of West in 2010 suddenly showed me how Economist is just a high end mouth piece of British government, hidden behind sophistication and the prestigious name. So I decided to just cancel my subscription.
The key to reading the Economist is to go into it not planning to read the whole thing.
My approach: Read all the short blurbs in the first couple of pages, then most of the 1/2 page articles that follow, note any that seem interesting, then seek out the longer versions deeper in the issue. As you work through the issue, skip or lightly skim the rest that don't spark interest.
Your "reading" it still, what is this 2005?? The audio edition is amazing! After three years of listening to every issue I think I may be picking up a British accent in my day to day life.
I listen to it during my commute to work. Plus I get the issue on Thursday evening, as oppose to the physical copy that arrives Monday or Tuesday the following week.
How does that help with time? Nearly everyone reading it is most certainly capable of reading far, far faster than listening, no? I suppose if you have an unfortunate, long commute, it might work, but otherwise?
When you're doing physical tasks while not having to co-operate with someone else, you can listen to the audio version while continuing to execute on the physical task.
You can also listen while moving your person about from place to place, which can be quite hard or inefficient to do while reading.
I certainly spend a lot of time moving from one place to another. I also assume there are plenty of people who do the same.
It's quite hard to read while making lunch, cleaning, running, cycling etc. It's also quite hard to concentrate on anything cerebral after a day of work, doing any number of these things and tending to the needs of small kids.
Audio books, OTOH, make housework a joy since I can tune out of the horror of cooking and cleaning and concentrate on accumulating knowledge from one source or another.
Also, much more motivation to run since simlarly, I can just observe my pulse meter occasionally and otherwise concentrate on the book.
I had the same issue. Then I found out the Economist puts out a audio version of their entire print edition. My podcast app downloads it automatically every Thursday (using RSS), and it provides me with more than enough content for the week. I listen to it at 1.5x speed and can get through 5-10 articles during my commute.
I had the same issue when I was up for renewal a few years back, with issues piling up and no time, but I didn't want to miss the content. I first tried the audio version of the iPhone app, but the complexity of the content was too much for a non-English native. Finally I decided for the digital version on the iPhone gap, which I read while commuting.
When I read about topics in which I have first hand experience, I feel The Economist does an excellent job of portraying the facts and different perspectives. This almost never happens in any mainstream media, especially regarding technology and trading. Therefore, I trust The Economist on topics in which I don't have first hand experience. They rarely let me down. I hope this continues and it seems they believe it will only improve.
Yes - I recall reading it at a friend's house in the late 90ies, talking about open source software. I expected a bit more negative reaction from a business-oriented publication, but they had most of their facts right and seemed to have a pretty good take on things. I subscribed afterwards myself.
I also love the fact that they got into a legal tussle with Berlusconi after having called him not fit to lead Italy - and won!
I used to have that feeling to, but that has changed in recent years. For instance they gravely misrepresented things in a their Nordic issue a couple of years back.
I've been reading The Economist for ten years, including this week's issue during my BART ride this morning. Other commenters have voiced appreciation for their in-depth reporting and liberal (in the classical sense of free people and free markets) values, but we haven't mentioned the paper's sense of humor -- the jokes are small but clever, and make for a more interesting read than the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times without sacrificing an ounce of rigor.
They don't get enough credit for their humour. The covers sometimes have me cutting them off and hanging them on the wall – a great recent example was the "Hiyatollah!" cover.
Speaking of The Economist, is anyone else getting a ridiculous amount of third party spam pushing The Economist subscriptions?
I'm getting several a day, typically from domains in the new TLDs, such as .date, .science, .faith, and .review. The domain names match the IP addresses, have SPF records that check out, and they body doesn't have any of the usual things that make it look like spam, and so Spamassassin is marking many of these with a score of around -2.4. They look so non-spammy that even though I keep feeding them to my "train spam" script I'm barely getting the score to move. (Occasionally one does come from an IP that is in a blocklist and so does get marked as spam)
I assumed they were probably phishing attempts, but all the links really do go to The Economist's website, and the ones in the mail that go to ordering pages use https and the certificate checks out.
My current guess is that it is a rogue affiliate, or possibly that The Economist is not doing a good job of policing their affiliates since the rules of their affiliate program [1] (assuming that's what those actually are) says that affiliates can send email to people in their own database, but that these must be approved by the merchant (which would be The Economist) prior to being sent. All the links when they end up at The Economist have a /AFF/DM appended which I'm guessing identifies the affiliate.
I'm absolutely certain that I did not subscribe to their affiliate's list because not only am I getting these at my home address, I am also getting them at my work address, AND I'm getting them at several former co-worker addresses that are forwarded to me (just in case some legacy report or monitor was overlooked when addresses were updated when they left), and I'm also getting them on some work mailing list addresses (e.g., it@my_employer).
Be sure to check the origin/return address before you blame the Economist.
I receive multiple Economist spam emails a day, and none of them are from <>@economist.com, or a marketing firm. The TLDs alone give them away: <>@<>.faith, <>@<>.date, and so on.
The links in the emails also go to the odd TLDs or to clearly bogus domains.
I'm not blaming The Economist. I'm blaming some third party member of their affiliate program. (Do affiliate programs ever not end up with some affiliate spamming?)
The links in the emails go to the odd TLDs, where they then redirect a few times ending up at The Economist with what appears to be affiliate tracking information in the URL, which I presume is so that the spamming affiliate will get paid if I subscribe at that point.
If I can figure out what email address @economist.com to report this to I'll send them a sample of one of the mails and the affiliate tagging information and hopefully they'll kick that affiliate out of their program.
"The Economist Group is owned by the Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, Agnelli and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders. "
I think people don't grasp the enormous influence publishers of news have, and thus the signifance to everyone of who owns them, their politics, integrity, and whether they will insist on journalistic integrity or compromise it. I see many, many people repeating what is effectively propaganda from News Corp publications (Fox and the Wall St Journal), competely unwittingly. The public seems surprisingly easy to manipulate, and few seem to care for accountability from their news sources.
> The Economist, whose editorial independence is absolute and is fiercely guarded by four independent trustees
Everyone says things like that. I hope it's true for them; there are few publications that are there equal and millions take them at their work.
Inceidetally, given that I've done a lot of complaining about the Economist in this thread, one of the things I really like is that their world view is not the "Ra Ra Free Market Uber Alles" that they are so often parodied as. They often firmly advocate government spending and market regulation as the correct solution to problems. They have a flexible world view in general.
I thought it was interesting that they mentioned they have 10M twitter followers compared to 5.6M Facebook fans - interesting given Facebook has 5x the MAU of twitter.
Screw it, I just subscribed. I often read articles from the Economist and often quite enjoy them, I think I will quite enjoy a physical copy delivered every week.
I think a few years ago they had a section outlining all the polite British euphemisms that are employed in writing unflattering obituaries yet avoiding the libel lawyers (describing a philanderer, drunkard, closet homosexual, etc. in so many words recognizable to all yet not exposing undue liability)
Reminds me of when Watson expesses sudden outrage at his newspaper description of himself as a 'confirmed bachelor' on the Sherlock TV show I bent over double laughing, utterly mystifying my friends.
The Economist has swung increasingly right-wing in its editorial stances and even editing over the last several years. It will be interesting to see if this change has any impact either way.
As a subscriber of the economist since 2003, I'm curious to know which articles and views you are referring to. If anything, the Economist is one of the most (if not the most) balanced magazine I've ever come across.
I think the pro-free-trade, anti-regulation, anti-union, and anti-populist sentiment used to be limited to the 'leaders' or specific editorials; since ~2006 it has become much more common in the content articles.
I think it's 1) more balanced than most 2) still not very balanced and 3) easy enough to sort out the facts from the liberal (in the global sense of the word) triumphalism.
But they're definitely more in tune with the Austrian school than with the Keynesians or the Krugmanites. Calling it a "left-wing weekly" is pretty questionable.
Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements?
PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue.
PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times---worth paying for---although they have gone so broad recently that I'm worried they're becoming unfocused, trying to appeal to too many at once.