Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest\u201d\u201dThe Economist\u201d\u201dis not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits\u201d\u201da remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher\u2019s Information Bureau. Newsweek\u2019s and Time\u2019s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. (The Economist\u2019s revenues declined in the first quarter of this year, but so did almost every magazine\u2019s.) 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s success holds a number of lessons for dead-tree revanchists on how to manage this displacement.<\/p>\n