Is The Economist on its last legs?
Economist Magazine is not dead. It just needs to take a good look at itself and stop trying to be “right wing”
Who is The Economist owned by?
It should have been bought by an American, rather than by a government funded corporation with almost no political affiliation at all. In fact, it has always seemed like a bit of a giveaway to me that something called “The Economist magazine” is owned by a private company with very little control over what’s on the page…
If you were paying for The Economist in paper form or from subscription services, you would know how much more your money looked like this –
And even if it wasn’t a private ownership, The Economist magazine must have thought twice about this. Even their logo itself was printed in public domain
So it seems like they are trying to make up for lost profits. But I don’t think anyone could argue against someone who makes a few thousand per year in profit to build things. So I would say the Economist magazine is probably doing more harm than good
If I were buying this newsletter for myself using my credit card, would it really matter? Most of us have access to email at least one other person so we have a lot more social contacts, but there is no reason why I can’t subscribe to several different publications. Would people think this was being done for my convenience? Not really, especially since I already have many newsletters and journals I read every day.
Maybe they haven’t tried enough because they’re struggling financially, but The Economist magazine is still publishing articles. They aren’t making headlines, are they? And some of the stories are interesting.
I am personally fine with them continuing to publish articles in print (they’re definitely worth reading). I would say even they should try harder though. Maybe this thing needs to go beyond writing about the economy and focus on politics too.
So maybe there is one issue where I am quite happy. If economists have to pay money to publish their work, then you have to pay money for their magazines too. My understanding is that they have not published anything recent in terms of history or politics, so I think readers will find a lot less value in writing about economics again. But it’s also true of newspapers as well. No longer can these companies put out great pieces about current events, etc to keep readers interested.
I’d be happier if there were a way to skip publications and see only latest articles, which would be a very small inconvenience (I can’t imagine how much damage The Economist magazine can do now). Maybe putting advertisements on your newspaper subscription at the beginning and end of each week could be better. Or perhaps allowing it to use Amazon’s cloud service on printing it up. Maybe even getting into Facebook groups devoted to the topic could give The Economist content a bit more weight. As for the subscriptions, maybe add a nice discount to see even more articles.
Would the price of the first edition be affordable? Are there any discounts, or any options for online access? Can everyone get a copy? What about the hard copies? Will you have to wait until the next editions come out? All these questions need a serious rethink of copyright law, or perhaps not anymore at all. There are so many more issues to cover that I can’t think of at all. Nowadays it does seem like such an overwhelming time to be worrying about the environment and all the climate change stuff. We’re so short sighted about everything.
I think The Economist magazine is going in the opposite direction. To be honest, I haven’t gotten a real sense of whether there is actually progress. Sure, the articles are written in simple language, but they don’t talk about any actual political situation and I’m not sure how valuable they really are.
