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Why Time and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist
- jpcx01 17y agoI'm holding off on my Kindle purchase until the Economist is available on it.
- adrianwaj 17y agoYou can read Newsweek, Economist, Time, VF and others from the 'Media' top menu of my website: http://twitya.com/ http://twitya.com/ eg: http://twitya.com/#theeconomist http://twitya.com/#theeconomist http://twitya.com/#Newsweek http://twitya.com/#Newsweek and make up your own mind about any. Last time I checked, The Economist tilts to the left.
- villageidiot 17y agoWhat's the point of that?
- adrianwaj 17y agoThe point is to read, think and progress.
- villageidiot 17y agoOf course. But what I meant was, why go to your site? Why not go directly to economist.com to read, think and progress?
- flipbrad 17y agoAnybody here read Prospect?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 17y agoAnd if you can get over the absolutely massive amount of wasted paper in each issue, Vanity Fair is a far better subscription to have than Time.
- winanga 17y agoYep, agreed. When is someone going to port Adblock Plus over to the offline world?
- brandnewlow 17y agoWhat if you set up an intermediate magazine service? People subscribe to magazines through you, paying a hefty premium. They get their magazines with all the ads town out of them a day later than usual.
- jfornear 17y agoI doubt that model would hold considering the fact that ad-blockers are too cheap to subscribe to a service like that, but why not just pay the magazine a little more in subscription fees? The aura of anti-advertising among the tech crowd is somewhat sad. The ads are on consumers' side in terms of keeping the price of content down. That being said, I too use Adblock. :) Advertisers need to bring the annoyance level down a notch (especially with those automatic-popout-video-player-banner-deals-with-broken-mute-buttons).
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- anigbrowl 17y agoIt's not just Time and Newsweek. I get complimentary subscriptions to both Fortune and Money, and I find it almost impossible to read either of them. It's like a bad television transcript. (17 page rant about the failings of most media and media consumers implied)
- blackman 17y agoI like the economist but find the density of information in there is overwhelming (I can't seem to find the time to read the whole thing in a week). Additionally, I feel the stories hold more importance than from other news sources.
- tortilla 17y agoYes it's overwhelming but that's why I always bring a copy when I fly. Great time killer, because you end up reading stuff you wouldn't read elsewhere. :)
- brandnewlow 17y agoAnother thing those magazines can never compete on, anonymity. The Economist doesn't run bylines. This is unthinkable for most journalists and publications. Without bylines, then you actually have to pay your people a decent wage. Also, without bylines, historically the Economist has been able to get contributions from people who'd rather not be recognized, foreign ministers, state department officials, people who actually know what's going on.
- cwan 17y agoThat's a double edged sword - if you've read their blogs, they don't have just one blog writer and at times writers actively disagree with each other. It just gets downright bizarre. Further, the lack of a byline also results in a lack of accountability/ability to deny responsibility. Frankly, I've also found their quality has gone down over the last few years since writers like Megan McArdle left.
- lacker 17y agoI have been looking for a while for a second magazine subscription I actually like, the first being The Economist. Still no luck; the closest I have come were Wired and Seed. Any advice?
- sachinag 17y agoThe Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker, EDGE (UK games mag), and The New York Review of Books (technically a newspaper) are good.
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoMIT's Technology Review is always interesting. I also like "top-level" academic/professional journals like Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum, Science, and Nature. There are so many sub-specialties in these fields that authors put in a lot of exposition to keep everyone on the same page. The result is usually surprisingly readable, and there are a lot of implicit pointers to more information if something really catches your eye. They're not cheap, though.
- andrewf 17y agoI used to chuck Communications of the ACM until last year's total revamp. It's really good now.
- tjic 17y agoI second "The Atlantic". Harpers has moments of brilliance, but there's less there that I would consider compelling reading. The New Yorker is too insufferably Upper East Side Manhattan Pretentious Intellectual for me - it's more, IMO, about espousing a particular world view of weary sophistication than anything else.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- pradocchia 17y agoFrom 1993 to 2003 I read the Economist religiously, cover to cover, every week, for the regular reasons. This was from high school through college, grad school and early career. Then came Iraq and WMD. WMD was so clearly a cover story, such obvious propaganda. I'd open up the Economist, expecting to read some scalding critique of GWB, and instead find them pushing the same damn line. WTF? I'd beware of it. The corruptive power of intelligent yet intellectually dishonest argument should not be underestimated.
- ellyagg 17y agoThe corruptive power of accusing those with whom you disagree about public policy of being intellectually dishonest should not be underestimated.
- tjic 17y agoThis is a poorly written / passive-voiced comment, but the core thought is good. Restating: "Don't leap to assume the worst of others". or "People can come to different conclusions honestly - disagreeing with you does not mean that they are venal". or "Reasonable people can differ".
- igorhvr 17y agoReasonable people can differ only if their prior information is different. Or, "People with the same priors cannot agree to disagree.", as put by Robert J. Aumann here: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2958591 http://www.jstor.org/pss/2958591
- tjic 17y ago> Reasonable people can differ only if their prior information is different. Disagree entirely. When evaluating complex choices in a chaotic world, we humans use tons of heuristics. There are a lot of things that aren't quantifiable information, but still allow two rational people to reach different conclusions: models of the universe, weight attached to different speakers, moral stances, worldviews, etc.
- jaaron 17y agoThe Economist and The Financial Times are the only two publications I've subscribed to in the last decade. I'm not completely convinced people are uninterested though. Before we met, my wife wouldn't have given the Economist a second glance. Now she's a more regular reader than I am. Often you just have to give people a chance.
- davidw 17y agoIsn't a subscription to The Economist part of the standard kit for people who live "abroad" (for whatever definition of abroad)?:-) My wife is the same way.
- skorgu 17y agoConcur to both. The Economist is a necessity for my commute. I find my wife stealing before I can get to it most weeks :) The FT is harder to justify if you have a good set of financial rss feeds but the economist has no real substitute.
- cf 17y agoWhat is a good set of financial rss feeds?
- arjunnarayan 17y agohttp://www.theonion.com/content/node/34138 http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34138 Ooh, look at me, I read the Economist. :) But seriously, I laugh because everything in the onion article applies to me.
- biohacker42 17y agoI think the original article misses a critical point. I WILL make time and gladly pay for any truly intelligent publication. At least in my case, it's not a fixed sized market. But intelligent work is hard to find. You can't fake it, it's hard to buy and that's why there's so little intelligent reporting and writing. And that's why I read the economist. I read the economist online edition. Hacked into it when I was a broke college student. I had recently arrived in the sates and resorted to hacking because I was poor and shocked by the lack of hard news in the US. That was many years ago and now I can easily afford a subscription. I keep thinking I really should get one, it would be the right thing TM to do. But I'm a cheapskate and I keep forgetting to pay for the Economist. Which means you'll never see me carrying an issue, or reading one. And because my memory for anything other then code is crap, I'm not going to tell you I red this or that in the Economist. You'll almost never hear me mention the Economist. Except in this post - The Economist :)
- martythemaniak 17y agoI actually consider their pervasive editorializing to be their weakest point, not only because they can be quite wrong (The Iraq war as others have pointed out), but also because it actually gets highly repetitive and tiring. I like reading about political malaise in Japan or the energy industry in Brazil, but I don't like them putting the same opinion in both articles. If they left their opinions only in Charlemagne/Lexington/Bagehot, they'd be a much better magazine.
- hobb0001 17y agoI have to disagree. Since the advent of blogging, I now prefer that style of writing. For example, the writing style in this article illustrates precisely why I no longer care for the standard journalistic style: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10226746-92.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10226746-92.html Can you imagine a standard technology coverage piece in your daily newspaper saying "kudos to Ubuntu 9.04: you got game"?
- hugothefrog 17y agoI used to, as another poster has mentioned, pick up a copy whenever I flew anywhere. Now I subscribe to the audio edition, which is of a fantastically high quality. Amazingly, there's more content (length-wise) that I can reasonably get through in a week of commuting, so I find myself skipping stories I'm not interested in. Unfortunately, they don't expose their audio feed as podcast. It's available as a zipped download full of individual MP3s for each section. I've written a script which scrapes and processes it weekly and turns it into an RSS feed so I can easily consume it. The audio really is high-quality, and their turn-around time for putting out a new edition each week is really impressive. Every now and then their editing process slips up, and you can hear what should have been out-takes in the audio. Stuff like the speaker repeating sentences, or having a number of tries at a particularly difficult word - pretty funny, really :)