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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, h

• kanwisher 11y ago
  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
  • Retric 11y ago
    At 1$/week you can pay for 1 author per ~2,000 subscribers. That can work at a really small scale as long as the rest of your costs are kept low.
    • eterm 11y ago
      $1/week is a lot for what a single author could put out. If you take into account time researching, I can't imagine that would amount to more an article per week at any kind of quality?
      • Retric 11y ago
        Let's say you have 40k readers and 50/50 overhead vs writers. So, 40k people pay 1$ 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.
  • metamet 11y ago
    I really enjoy the print version of Popular Science, if you're looking for another.
  • eevilspock 11y ago
    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.
    • ska 11y ago
      Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay. This may plausibly be necessary, but it certainly isn't sufficient.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      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.
  • IndianAstronaut 11y ago
    One thing I enjoy about it is the audio edition. It is done well and allows me to enjoy the Economist on the go without sinking too much time into it.
    • mikestew 11y ago
      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.
• deleted 11y ago
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• NelsonMinar 11y ago
  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?
  • selectodude 11y ago
    http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results_at_a_glance.html http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/results... Operating profit of £60m, up 2% Circulation of The Economist robust at 1.6m 13% increase in gross profit from circulation Final dividend up 5.5%
• jazzyk 11y ago
  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).
  • bradleyjg 11y ago
    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.
    • dbarlett 11y ago
      Congratulations, you don't suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect [1]. [1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2014/03/the-gell-mann-effect/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2014/03/the-ge...
    • igravious 11y ago
      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.
• atmosx 11y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood [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.
  • Kutta 11y ago
    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.
• rsync 11y ago
  "PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times" 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. Also McSweeneys and The Believer.
• fapjacks 11y ago
  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.
• ggchappell 11y ago
  > 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.
• hackuser 11y ago
  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/ http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ ---- 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.