The Newsweekly’s Last Stand - The Atlantic (July/August 2009): 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.... 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....
The easy lesson might be that quality wins out. The Economist is truly a remarkable invention—a weekly newspaper, as it calls itself, that canvasses the globe with an assurance that no one else can match.... A typical leader, from January, on the ongoing Gaza violence was an erudite, deeply historical write-around on Arab-Israeli violence that ended up arriving at the same conclusion everyone else arrived at long ago: Israel must give up land for peace.... [Y]ou come across a brilliant exploration of the current drug-fueled violence in Mexico, offered in support of The Economist’s long-held position in favor of legalization, and you suddenly feel like you have a handle on the world that you didn’t have before.... The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.
True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging....
The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface.... You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist.... The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know—and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out—is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.
It wasn't the marketing that got me to subscribe. I have more than enough printed matter coming to my home, thank you. I wanted access to their website and there was no web-only subscription.
Little did I realize that the "weekly newspaper" would provide many hours of reading at bedtime, waiting for appointments, or just taking the dog to the dog park. All of these are really hard to do from a website.
Something like Newsweek, on a good week, provides, at most, 45 minutes reading time.
It's the content!
Posted by: Nancy in STL | June 23, 2009 at 07:02 PM