What’s the Economist’s secret?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 1 March 2006 at 11:39
Tags: Economist, International, Journalism, United States

Taking Bill Emmott’s departure as editor of The Economist as a cue, his former deputy Clive Crook reflects upon the magazine’s success in the United States, which accounts for half its circulation.

The Economist has grown despite the wider trend of declining circulation of newspapers and general-interest magazines — and it has made money by charging a high cover price and remaining unabashedly highbrow — “outright heresy in today’s magazine-publishing business”, as Crook puts it.

Here in its home market, The Economist’s political influence is often said to be on the wane. Not so across the pond:

Concerning its influence, especially in the United States, take my word: Visiting correspondents and editors find that this country does not so much respect The Economist as revere it. Too long a spell in the Washington or New York bureaus can seriously inflame the ego. I shall say no more on this, except to note that, not long ago, the magazine was actually featured in an episode of The Simpsons. Homer and Marge took a flight and found themselves upgraded to first class. Sitting in unaccustomed luxury and enjoying fine wines and canapes, Homer holds up his magazine and tells Marge: “Look at me. I’m reading The Economist. Did you know that Indonesia is at a crossroads?”

Snob appeal might have something to do with it, but The Economist’s appeal to Americans also reflects its quality and its clash with the staid culture of American journalism:

The difference between perceptions of the magazine in Britain and America, I think, has more to do with those countries’ respective newspaper markets. Britain has a highly competitive national market with many good papers vying for the same readers. They differentiate themselves partly with a frank display of editorial sympathies—with ideology, in a word. America has a tradition of locally monopolized newspaper markets and a resulting sense of obligation to supply a remorselessly bland editorial neutrality. (Set aside the question of whether that neutrality is more apparent than real.)

Ideas in American newspapers are fenced off from reporting. Opinion pieces are very often just that, mere statements of a point of view, tribally affiliated, artfully and coherently argued—or not, as the case may be. The Economist’s forthright blend of reporting and sharp-elbowed commentary looks strange to American readers, stranger than it does to the British. A magazine that supports abortion rights, opposes the death penalty, and is scandalized by Guantanamo—but that is also pro-market, pro-capitalist, and in favor of a muscular American foreign policy—is stranger than strange. And it is wise in this industry, other things equal, to be different.

Unlike rival titles, what Crook calls the “house journal of globalization” has never pandered to its readers, that growing transnational class, “Economist Man” — “educated, English-speaking, well traveled, with international business connections, intellectually engaged with the world around them as much as with where they happen to live.”

… In my experience, the editorial side of the enterprise spends little time worrying about what readers might want. …

I suspect that if The Economist ever starts to worry very much about the new readers it would like to reach, in print and on the Internet, and to think about how it should tailor its content more deliberately with them in mind, then that will be the moment when its business starts to conform to industry averages. That is, after all, what everybody else is doing. …

So is that the secret of the Economist’s success?