The Economist takes the high road to global success
One of the hottest-selling magazines in America doesn’t publish celebrity covers or photos of scantily clad young women, doesn’t traffic in gossip or diet tips and doesn’t cater to a niche audience obsessed with cars, coins, cooking or collectibles. Moreover, it doesn’t call itself a magazine, and it isn’t published in America.
The Economist, the highbrow, high-end weekly magazine of global news and pungent views, celebrated its 160th anniversary in London last month with surging circulation despite an unsettled world economy.
Total circulation for the Economist is 880,000, up 73% in the last 10 years. In the United States -- by far the Economist’s largest market -- circulation is 352,000, up 81% in the same time period.
Business Week increased just 23%, to 987,000, and Time and Newsweek -- with circulations of 4.1 million and 3.1 million, respectively -- both lost circulation in that decade.
Even with an average annual subscription price (including discounts) of $102.51 -- two to three times more than its competitors’ -- the Economist’s circulation continues to climb, especially in the United States. The West Coast is its fastest-growing U.S. market -- up 45% from 1998 to 2002. (Los Angeles has the fourth-largest Economist circulation among U.S. cities.)
Annual profit for the Economist now approaches $40 million.
So how has an expensive, serious, elitist publication that looks like a magazine in every way -- size, format, color cover, glossy pages -- but considers itself a “weekly newspaper” managed to do so well in such a shaky economy?
One answer is that the rich really do get richer, and Economist readers are sufficiently well-heeled that a $100 subscription is but a drop in the Champagne bucket. Their median household income is $137,478 -- more than that of the readers of Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune or the New Yorker, according to last year’s Mendelsohn Affluent Head of Household Survey.
The same survey showed that Economist readers are also more likely to have a college degree -- and far more likely to have taken an international business flight in the past year -- than are the readers of any of those magazines, and those facts may help explain even more clearly the reasons for the its success.
We live in complex, troubled times, in an increasingly fractious world, and the Economist appeals directly to well-educated, well-traveled sophisticates eager for information, analysis and intelligent opinions on what it all means.
In the United States, suddenly awakened to the threat -- and the relevance -- of the outside world on Sept. 11, 2001, after decades of somnolent insularity, the Economist seems to have a special and growing appeal. Circulation here has shot up 20% since 9/11.
“Clearly, 9/11 produced an intensification of interest in -- and fear and puzzlement about -- the outside world, and that created an added appetite in the U.S. for what we provide,” Bill Emmott, editor of the Economist, told me by phone from London the other day. “But we’ve had a long period of growth in the U.S., and readers of the Economist didn’t need to have the Taliban or Saddam Hussein explained to them.”
Emmott traces the growth of the Economist here in part to the “dumbing down” of other U.S. media, and in that he’s surely right. Reality television, screaming-head talk shows and print media dominated by scandal, celebrity and sensationalism have created a vacuum for the serious presentation of news and analysis.
“The media are dumbing down, but the American people are not dumbing down,” Emmott says. “You continue to have the most outstanding higher-education system in the world, and you continue to buy books -- and not just Harry Potter.”
Indeed, while the Economist sells 90% of its copies by subscription, its single-copy sales are especially strong in bookstores. Recent figures showed it to be the No. 2 best-selling magazine in Borders bookstores and No. 3 at Barnes & Noble, ahead of many, much larger magazines.
Though liberal on many social issues -- favoring legalized drugs and gay marriage, for example -- the Economist is conservative on many economic issues.
Last month it said, “Unions everywhere are in decline, and to a large extent they deserve to be.... The unions have remained stubbornly (and often comically) old-fashioned. Dominated by men and dogmatic by instinct, they have been leaden-footed in response to profound changes in industries and markets.”
The Economist tries, however, to resist ideological pigeonholing. It strongly supported the U.S. war in Iraq, but its “leaders” -- the British term for editorials -- have been increasingly uneasy over the failure of U.S. and British forces to find weapons of mass destruction, and last week’s cover story/leader -- they’re sometimes the same -- strongly criticized the Bush administration’s use of military tribunals for suspected terrorists as “unjust, unwise, un-American.”
The Economist prides itself on looking ahead -- making predictions -- sometimes to its ultimate embarrassment, as with a 1999 story on a steep decline in world oil prices that concluded, “We may be heading for $5 [a barrel].”
As Emmott conceded when I asked him about this story, “We got it completely wrong, in the short term. Oil prices doubled within a week, then went up another 50%.”
Each issue of the Economist contains 65 pages of news and analysis and, approximately every other week, a 15-page “survey” of some major issue. The edition sold in Britain contains an extra two or three pages of British news, but the rest of the magazine has the same content everywhere, though the sequence and the advertising change region by region.
About half the time, the Economist appears with different covers in different countries -- two or three different covers, depending on what the editors think will appeal to readers in those regions.
But it’s the content, not the covers, that sells the Economist, and that content is not just intelligently and lucidly written, it’s also widely known for its irreverence -- particularly in headlines and photo captions.
A critical piece last month on Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia, was accompanied by a photo of a man toting a gun and wearing a bandolier of bullets. The caption: “A Taylor loyalist prepares for peace.”
Another recent Economist story, on the controversy over whether there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was headlined, “Tony Bliar?”
It’s difficult to envision such a headline about President Bush in Time or Newsweek.
Coverage broadened
For all its British sensibility, the Economist sells only 17% of its copies in the United Kingdom. It is a truly international magazine, despite its thoroughly parochial roots.
Founded in 1843 by James Wilson to advance the cause of free trade, the Economist over the years has expanded its interests beyond economics to include not only geopolitics but culture, science and technology. It has also changed its format -- most recently in May 2001, when a redesign brought color, a better index and other streamlining to its pages.
“Still, we’ve always thought of ourselves as a weekly newspaper,” Emmott says. “There is no tradition of newsmagazines in Britain, so we stuck to the newspaper [label] so as not to be confused with British magazines, which are definitely not about news and analysis.”
Whatever it calls itself, the Economist does adhere to one long-standing but now vanishing tradition of U.S. newsmagazines -- few bylines.
“We carry bylines only for our special surveys, the 10,000-word essays that really are individual efforts,” Emmott says. “The rest of our articles we work on in a collaborative, collective way, with more debate and discussion and challenge by colleagues than would be true in most publications.
“Journalists ... are egomaniacs and protective about their own territory and their own work, and not having bylines mitigates against that somewhat,” he says. “With bylines, you worry more about your own story. With no bylines, you worry more about the whole paper because your reputation depends on the reputation of the whole paper.”
The Economist certainly has an institutional ego -- critics often complain of the arrogant assertion of its views -- but its reputation remains as strong these days as its bottom line.
David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.
