Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest””The Economist””is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits””a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. (The Economist’s revenues declined in the first quarter of this year, but so did almost every magazine’s.) Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.
Unlike its rivals, The Economist has been unaffected by the explosion of digital media; if anything, the digital revolution has cemented its relevance. The Economist has become an arbiter of right-thinking opinion (free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism) at a time when arbiters in general are in ill favor. It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.
All of this suggests that although digital media is clearly supplanting everything analog, digital will not necessarily destroy analog. A better word might be displace. And The Economist’s success holds a number of lessons for dead-tree revanchists on how to manage this displacement.
Nearly everything in ‘Economist’ is very well written and cogently argued. Have you attempted to make sense of the 7th Grade piffle proffered by the American mags?
Only once in 30 years have I caught the Economist presenting an error in either of the two disciplines I know quite well, so I’m inclined to trust them for information in those disciplines I [i]don’t[/i] know. Newsweak and the others? Frequent, multiple egregious factual errors anyone having a first-year university course in the disciplines could have caught.
The American mags are failing because they’re poorly written rubbish.