
Why Time and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist - winanga
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/04/when-will-magazines-stop-trying-to-copy-the-economist.html
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pradocchia
From 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.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Your profile says you're new here.

Without judgment of your claims about WMD and the Iraq War, I'd recommend that
you take a look at the HN guidelines on comments and submissions:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

It's pretty hard to have only a lukewarm opinion on these issues, and there's
sufficient diversity of views around here to ensure that arguments on
political topics are fractious and unenlightening. So we tend to avoid those.

I highly recommend these articles, which describe a similar thought process:

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/02/politics_is_the.html>

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/policy_debates_.html>

~~~
quoderat
And there are plenty of objective facts about the Iraq war that are known. Not
all in the world is a matter of opinion, no matter how much some wingnuts (on
both sides) wish it were.

We ignore this at our peril. But overall, you're right. Little is ever gained
from political debate, and this probably isn't the place for it.

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brandnewlow
Another 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
That'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.

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wmeredith
How do you know she left? (Seriously)

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_pius
[http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/the_revolving_door/mca...](http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/the_revolving_door/mcardle_leaves_the_economist_for_the_atlantic_64634.asp)

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arjunnarayan
<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
I 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 :)

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jaaron
The 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.

~~~
skorgu
Concur 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
What is a good set of financial rss feeds?

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tptacek
And 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
Yep, agreed. When is someone going to port Adblock Plus over to the offline
world?

~~~
brandnewlow
What 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
I 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).

~~~
winanga
Stupid question - does HN have ads? I've never looked at it without Adblock!

~~~
jfornear
Nope. I don't think pg cares about generating any kind of financial gain from
HN aside from leads to successful YC companies.

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blackman
I 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
Yes 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. :)

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hugothefrog
I 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 :)

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anigbrowl
It'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)

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martythemaniak
I 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
I 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>

Can you imagine a standard technology coverage piece in your daily newspaper
saying "kudos to Ubuntu 9.04: you got game"?

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lacker
I 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
The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker, EDGE (UK games mag), and The New York
Review of Books (technically a newspaper) are good.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
MIT'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
I used to chuck _Communications of the ACM_ until last year's total revamp.
It's really good now.

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adrianwaj
You can read Newsweek, Economist, Time, VF and others from the 'Media' top
menu of my website: <http://twitya.com/> eg: <http://twitya.com/#theeconomist>
<http://twitya.com/#Newsweek> and make up your own mind about any. Last time I
checked, The Economist tilts to the left.

~~~
villageidiot
What's the point of that?

~~~
adrianwaj
The point is to read, think and progress.

~~~
villageidiot
Of course. But what I meant was, why go to your site? Why not go directly to
economist.com to read, think and progress?

~~~
adrianwaj
Save time for one. And, hit other mags too.

~~~
adrianwaj
Well, for me it works anyway. That's who I built it for.

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jpcx01
I'm holding off on my Kindle purchase until the Economist is available on it.

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flipbrad
Anybody here read Prospect?

