For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes
economist.com
economist.com
Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements?
PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue.
PPS I feel the same way about the NY Times---worth paying for---although they have gone so broad recently that I'm worried they're becoming unfocused, trying to appeal to too many at once.
Clearly, you can play with these numbers with various assumptions and readerships. But, the point is you can scale things down with paid subscribers.
We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads.
The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
We call ourselves hackers and innovators. Yet instead of pouring our energies into figuring alternative business models and micropayment solutions, we spend our energies on more ways to capture users in viral schemes and then collect their data for sale to advertisers.
As I wrote the other day: Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.
Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay.
The reason I'm ambivalent about ads is not because it funds my paycheck (it doesn't, we charge for our services), but because for all their evils, ads work as a kind of enforced redistribution mechanism, and since geographic adjustments of prices work poorly on the web, I fear that any kind of payment system will inevitably lead to prices being set at the US middle class income level, shutting out everyone with a lower income level.
I know can afford to pay for stuff, and I'm happy to do it, but that's only been true since I started working, and only because I'm lucky enough to have a decent job.
I suppose "we'll figure it out" is one answer, but I'm afraid I can't put my heart behind a proposal that would have left my teenager self closed off from most of the web.
Authors in this world would say they have no choice, because readers will always choose the free book over the $10 or even $5 book. The bookstores only stock the free books for the same reason.
In that world you would make exactly the same argument that you just made to me.
I'm glad you work on non ad-supported software. But look at it from a consumption, share of revenue and availability perspective: ad supported software is eating the web.
Would I have traded? Yes, I probably would have.
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I also don't agree that one must oppose all advertising or none; we can oppose native ads and personal tracking without being necessarily opposed to well demarcated side ads.
We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking.
Think out of the box.
Publishing, traditionally, has worked through integrated purchasing rather than dis-integrating purchasing. Magazines, newspapers, books, subscriptions, broadcast advertising (bundled payments through advertisers rather than subscribers). Music syndication. For numerous reasons.
Individually assessing the purchase validity of ever smaller quantities of content simply doesn't pan out. Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns, rather more so.
Micropayments are the media payment plan of the future, and always will be.
2. His arguments are one of an anal accountant. Do you know what fraction of the population even reviews their monthly credit card statement, their long distance phone charges, whether or not their mobile data plan minutes are being counted accurately, or whether their iTunes charges matches the number of songs they download exactly? A very small fraction. Do we need to? No, not all of us. We can trust that if a vendor violates trust and commits fraud, someone will catch it and they will suffer a class-action lawsuit, as does actually happen.
3. "Paying into a kitty and apportioning based on general consumption patterns" can work great if the amount I pay per month is fixed, and that fixed payment is apportioned among the things I consumed in a way that rewards quality. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960. This is just a simple idea by me, an amateur.
Back to "impossibles":
- If before Wikipedia existed, someone proposed to create an online encyclopedia that anyone in the world could anonymously edit, that it be funded by donations and that it become the encyclopedia that most people refer to, nearly 100% of us would have rolled on the floor and laughed out loud.
- If before it existed someone described a magical currency with the properties of what we now call Bitcoin, most would have said, "yeah right".
- If before asymmetric public-private key encryption was invented, someone said we needed a way to communicate where one side could decrypt something sent by the other but not be able to do the reverse and thereby pose as the other, most would have said, "good luck."
Please, please stop speaking in absolutes. It comes off as rather arrogant and foolish rhetoric.
And yet... there are numerous alternatives which aren't Apple: streaming music services (a bundled, non-micropayments model, either pre-paid or adverts supported), YouTube (adverts). Frankly, I've largely gotten out of the music-buying habit, though I'll pick up a CD occasionally at a show.
Your points on statement review largely make my point: if the idea of micropayments is to make people rational consumers of content, then if they're failing to review and assess their purchase habits, they simply aren't rational consumers. Which is to say, the premise of micropayments is false.
For long distance, he specifically addresses the case: the cost of attributing billing costs was itself a huge portion of the cost of service itself. By moving to flat pricing you can at once reduce costs and reduce customer anxiety over service use. I've been on flat-fee pay-as-you-go comms plans for years now. For what I'm paying, it literally isn't worth the telco's time to compute costs.
The kitty payment method is pretty much precisely how music broadcast and public performance (think bars, restaurants, stores) payments work. You've got a few licensing agencies (ASCAP, Harry Fox), playtime measurement (logs from radio stations and the services providing streams to retail establishments), and artists are cut a check based on plays.
Various checks and balances keep everything reasonably honest. Performance licenses are held by establishments and not performers -- it's the nightclub owner, not the band, who's on the hook for the fee. That greatly simplifies logistics -- on the spectrum of unreliable characters, bar owners rate higher than drummers, or even front-men. Shenanigans by the licensing agencies can be pursued by class-actions among musicians (not to say they can't or don't get screwed, but there are some checks). And the end consumer of the music (bar / nightclub / restaurant / store patron) doesn't worry about any of this at all.
The whole "rewarding quality" is something to consider, though I'll note that Apple dispensed with this entirely at least initially: everything cost the same amount. I can see (and have made) arguments to why this shouldn't be the case (high-quality scientific research or investigative journalism strikes me as more worthwhile than algorithmically generated tone patterns). And I'm not pretending to have a solution fully worked out. But I'm almost certain it lies in the direction of aggregated, not disaggregated, payments. Broadband tax. Syndication fee. General funds tax. Patronage to creators. Something like that.
As for Wikipedia: it follows patterns of collaborative work which date back centuries (review some of the early history of dictionaries and encyclopedias).
Bitcoin's got numerous problems, of which scaling is one. Trust another.
PKI's roots trace back to at least 1874 and William Stanley Jevons, who's just become even more interesting in my estimation. The primary limitation, aside from successful algorithms, was cheap and ubiquitous computing. As that came online, first for institutions and governments, later for individuals.
I'm not aware of any significant discussion that PKI was impossible. One-way functions have been known for centuries. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's work postdated national security implementations of PKI by British GCHQ by only three years.
Discussion of absolutes is risky, but there are a few.
I challenge you to exceed 300,000 km/s.
Others similarly exist in various fields, including social and economic ones. Part of the basis for my own statements is Gresham's Law, which I'm coming to view as a fundamental and principle limitation for economics. Others would include the Law of Diminishing Returns, and variations of the maximum power principle (Darwin-Lotke energy law, White's Law).
What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN who would rather see ads than pay for stuff.
Bashing ads is just starting to get hip, just as bashing Flash only got hip relatively recently, after an earlier period where Apple got bashed by many simply for being ahead of the mainstream.
Perhaps we'll have greater success if we can first agree on common ground?
There's a fundamental force at play here that extends far beyond the internet. I'm not entirely sure what it is.
Attention and mind share can be bought. This causes some weird outcomes in the Internet and politics.
It has to do with how we obtain/exchange value in our society - speech, information, material goods, attention, justice, etc. Perhaps how we make people produce value: labour, creation, votes.
Could we get closer to a solution if we spent more time understanding the root cause?
Operating profit of £60m, up 2%
Circulation of The Economist robust at 1.6m
13% increase in gross profit from circulation
Final dividend up 5.5%
I have been a subscriber to The Economist for 25 years now, and while I don't always agree with their opinions, their articles are unquestionably well researched - and beautifully written (and often tongue-in-cheek, British-style).
I enjoy reading the Economist, but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay.
AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker.
[1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2014/03/the-ge...
The New York Times has great writers but it is incredibly biased even though it pretends to be impartial -- really it is only a notch up from Pravda and whatever that mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party is called. There have been numerous scandals over the past decades involving journalistic integrity. It is telling that Snowden's revelation broke in the Grauniad (as Private Eye nicknamed it) and the WashPo (dunno). Journalism is in an _amusing_ place right now what with Al Jazeera (in English!), Russia Today, The Intercept, and others. Don't know where I'd class the BBC News.
EDIT: That said I do have a subscription to them.
* It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the economist.
* You never know the author. You never know the actual author's background so reading between the lines is (in the beginning at least) hard
* It has it's own view of economics, which most of the times is miles apart from the academia: If I had to choose between 'Buttonwood'[1] and Paul Krugman, I'd go with Krugman any day of the week. Having different opinion is one thing, diverting from mainstream academia views CONSTANTLY on 101 macro-economics is another.
* The Economist is extremely PRO-WAR. There is NOT ONE instance that I recall the economist NOT backing a war: Afghanistan, Iraq... Latest one was Syria. The magazine's editor, openly called for the USA to attack Syria. The article (main article btw) was awful and brutal.
Are there any good articles in there? Of course. There are many good articles featuring in the Economist. But overall it's not nearly as good and fair as most people think it is.
I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally.
Generally speaking I found "The New Yorker" to be the best[2] magazine so far. I think part of the reason is that it's not on the spotlight so much, as the 'Economist' and the authors receive less pressure to push a specific agenda.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttonwood
[2] When I say 'best' in this context I mean avoiding 'double standards' giving everyone a voice and so on. For example check out the articles on Wikileaks, Assange, Snowden or any controversial figure in the Economist vs New Yorker. The New Yorker features interviews, articles and views from both parties, not only from the US gov. The Economist on the other hand even when it tries to be fair to someone, uses diminutive terms like "unorthodox", "unconventional", "self-proclaimed", etc. That's not journalism, that's manipulation. The worst form of manipulation.
As to the Iraq war, it might have been the case that they supported the invasion right at the beginning (someone could point me to links), but since the casus belli turned out to be bogus I can't remember reading anything but denunciation of the war from the Economist.
I personally find the "he said, she said" style of reporting that purports to give a fair account of all sides intolerable and hypocritical. It often allows complete idiots to air their opinions in the name of presenting a "different" view. This lets the reporter subtly influence the reader while preserving the illusion of impartiality.
The Economist is a highly biased newspaper. Unlike nearly all other publications aspiring to high-brow status, it displays its biases openly.
There, you just described the economist.
Okay, jokes apart... My 'problem' is that most mainstream media, doesn't consider the economist biased. I didn't consider the economist biased in the past. When I did, I stopped my subscription because it had nothing to offer: I knew beforehand what am I going to read on (almost) any given situation.
Besides, what is an "orthodox" position? Whose?
It actually does for some of them, in its prospectus, mentioned by me earlier in this thread.
http://www.economist.com/node/1873493
Wikipedia's article has more on the Newspaper's history.
May I enquire as to your stance on the corn laws?
>>it displays its biases openly.
Nope. It claims to speak from the perspective of economists but instead is pushing a panglosian, unilateral free trade agenda. The world view has many internal contradictions (OP notes their treatment of good and evil countries, China is for some reason in the good category despite working hard to disrupt US hegemony while other countries that verbally protest are labeled evil), I can only assume they have sinister motives or are mentally retarded. Much like Fox News.
I'd concur with this. Even though I disagreed with some of the articles I found them to be well written/edited and I'd learn about different viewpoints (so I subscribed). They even published a style guide. I don't recall when but I started to feel that they (ironically) stopped following their own style guide and around the same time the quality began to drop.
Bill Emmott resigned as editor in February 2006.
Then, in the mid-naughts, I recall begin shocked as they started to run epic essays begging Karl Rove to attempt to rise above politics as usual, and about how Texas represented the future of the world. Completely off the rails.
I'm starting to sour a bit on NYT. I do feel that The New Yorker and London Review of Books are both very good examples, however - paid content that is very, very well done and worthwhile.
Also McSweeneys and The Believer.
It certainly is. But I wonder how much their strategy can really serve as a model for others.
On the one hand, the Economist might be seen as saying, "Here is how to do it." Others can follow and similarly prosper, with increasingly large markets being served.
Or, on the other hand, the Economist might simply be meeting all of the demand for a publication like itself. And the only way for another company to do as well using the same strategy, would be to produce a publication that is convincingly better than the Economist, thus putting the original out of business.
1) Newspaper journalism is very hard; look at how much new research (i.e., almost everything they publish outside the editorial page) they publish every day; they're going to get a few things wrong and make a few errors in judgment. However, name a paper that does this job better.
2) The ideological right-wing, trendy in some places (e.g., News Corp publications such as Fox News and the Wall St Journal), in their effort to discredit any source of information for their followers but themselves, have tried to politicize the NY Times. After all, the NY Times prints facts, and those are always a threat to any ideology.
That said, some errors, such as during the leaup to the Iraq War, are inexcusable (but what papers did better?[1]). They're the best, but they could improve a lot.
[1] I think the one answer might be McClatchy's (a leading owner of local papers) DC bureau. Highly recommended for their courage on unpopular questions and for their integrity. A very underappreciated resource: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/
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The Economist and NY Times do two different jobs. The Economist provides analysis; the NY Times generates and presents new knowledge (i.e., journalism), essentially for you to do your own analysis.
For example, the NY Times researches and breaks the story on NSA wiretapping; the Economist provides context and analysis of it (think about it: Have you ever seen the Economist break a story?). The NY Times interviews the head of the NSA, telecommunications companies, privacy adocates, etc. and provides their responses to you. The Economist summarizes and analyszes the responses (think about it: how often do you see quotes in the Economist?).
I'm not criticizing one or the other; both have their place. My perspective: The Economist approach is more efficient (someone does the analysis for you) but is more prone to bias (e.g., they apply their free market ideology everywhere). The Times approach is essential (someone has to create the new knowledge) and less prone to bias, but you need to read a lot more to understand the same story.
Phew, I was really worried they were selling to News Corp or something when I saw the headline. I've often thought of the Economist as the weekly version of FT, but the two are actually quite independent from each other (both in editorial control and legal control). Pearson had a 50% stake in the Economist but only 6/13 board seats. And the Economist has been great about fiercely guarding its editorial independence.
But if you consider the question as "I don't know what is wrong with news corp" than it's the best question you can ask.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/news-c...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/21/attacks-on-abc-...
And I don't think anyone reasonable believes Fox is anything but a Conservatives-centric news network that plays out the News Corp official line in all situations.
Unlike some organisations (e.g., NewsCorp), these biases are at least explicitly stated, if not widely known.
While I generally respect it, I find its skew at times quite painful to swallow. At least the writing is generally well executed.
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Notes:
It also doesn't address any unstated biases The Economist Group might have.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/72607/20150731/mpaa-secret...
And the board isn't even that powerful, it needs consent from the Trustees for many things, such as appointing the editor and the chairman:
http://www.economistgroup.com/results_and_governance/trustee...
Now that I know I'm not subsidizing Pearson with my subscription, I'll be even happier to renew.
Thought you might want want to know :-)
I am more wary of one of those greasy-activist-investor types coming into the picture and demanding the publication "does more for the investors", i.e. more Kardashian-style (garbage) news.
;)
After reading each issue I feel informed about what is going on around the world. This has sparked many conversations with people from around the world.
I hope that following this transition that 'feeling of being informed' will not go away and I have no reason to suspect it would.
If only I had local and regional news at such a calibre...
It really is a great publication but I couldn't justify the spending or the piling up of issues. I might go back this year, been thinking about it.
My approach: Read all the short blurbs in the first couple of pages, then most of the 1/2 page articles that follow, note any that seem interesting, then seek out the longer versions deeper in the issue. As you work through the issue, skip or lightly skim the rest that don't spark interest.
You can also listen while moving your person about from place to place, which can be quite hard or inefficient to do while reading.
I certainly spend a lot of time moving from one place to another. I also assume there are plenty of people who do the same.
Audio books, OTOH, make housework a joy since I can tune out of the horror of cooking and cleaning and concentrate on accumulating knowledge from one source or another.
Also, much more motivation to run since simlarly, I can just observe my pulse meter occasionally and otherwise concentrate on the book.
I listen to it during my commute to work. Plus I get the issue on Thursday evening, as oppose to the physical copy that arrives Monday or Tuesday the following week.
I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.
I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts.
The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a political interpretation that you can't realistically argue with unless you are an expert in the some very niche domain. This leads to many people in my field (finance) having strong opinions on an impossible variety of subjects which ultimately boils down to parroting the economist. The culture of "lying with statistics" comes to mind.
I realize many of these problems are inherent in journalism but the economist relies more than others on being opaquely unimpeachable. Reading the economist felt less like a dialog and more like "believe us or appear uninformed in public."
Think about how multifaceted US policy is on any given day of the year. The economist boils down similar issues to a blurb on a page with a heading that says "middle east." So now you can turn that page and be confident that for this week you know what's going on in the middle east.
The truth is the economist fills a void. Before reading an issue you know nothing about current events in India. After reading you know something. Something is vastly more power than confessing ignorance in any situation. And if anyone questions you, well, the economist said so.
I think I'm justified in being skeptical.
I think they're assuming their readers will know how to dig further on events they find relevant. Personally I find The Economist pairs well with a subscription to Foreign Affairs.
Reading a single issue will not make you well-informed; at most it will provide you with something to chat about at a cocktail party (if you're the sort of person who likes to chat about the news) or a point of reference if you meet someone from a foreign country and want to ask a topical question.
I've found that reading over time is advantageous, not because one collects more and more trivia about more and more places (although that's true) but because the more important themes emerge of their own accord most of the time. By this is I mean that one tends to become aware of major issues long before they rise to the top of the 24 hour news cycle.
Mounting a challenge within an institutional or constitutional framework is qualitatively different - it puts the rule of law above pure power politics.
Contrarian to what? It follows the Washington Consensus pretty much religiously.
It also came out in favor of George Bush and the Iraq war in the beginning (when everybody else was) and against them after (when everybody else was also).
The vast majority of economist articles can be summed up as "you thought it was that way, but it's actually this way."
If they start supporting Bernie Sanders' run, though, I'll take notice.
There is a sort of sophmoric danger zone WRT being informed on any issue. Sometimes you can be informed enough to discuss something, but lack a proper nuanced understanding from multiple sides.
I'm fickle when it comes to magazines, but I still love reading them. My latest infatuation is Harpers. However, in their latest issue they wrote a medium length piece on something in my area of expertise, and kinda did a poor job of it. This makes me question the quality of their other pieces on subjects that I am less familiar with.
I have some formal training in economics, but not enough to call myself an economist. However, even I can see that the economist performs their economic narrative generation a bit too neatly. They leave out nuance in favor of length.
I also love the fact that they got into a legal tussle with Berlusconi after having called him not fit to lead Italy - and won!
http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-07-16/ap-e...
I'm getting several a day, typically from domains in the new TLDs, such as .date, .science, .faith, and .review. The domain names match the IP addresses, have SPF records that check out, and they body doesn't have any of the usual things that make it look like spam, and so Spamassassin is marking many of these with a score of around -2.4. They look so non-spammy that even though I keep feeding them to my "train spam" script I'm barely getting the score to move. (Occasionally one does come from an IP that is in a blocklist and so does get marked as spam)
I assumed they were probably phishing attempts, but all the links really do go to The Economist's website, and the ones in the mail that go to ordering pages use https and the certificate checks out.
My current guess is that it is a rogue affiliate, or possibly that The Economist is not doing a good job of policing their affiliates since the rules of their affiliate program [1] (assuming that's what those actually are) says that affiliates can send email to people in their own database, but that these must be approved by the merchant (which would be The Economist) prior to being sent. All the links when they end up at The Economist have a /AFF/DM appended which I'm guessing identifies the affiliate.
I'm absolutely certain that I did not subscribe to their affiliate's list because not only am I getting these at my home address, I am also getting them at my work address, AND I'm getting them at several former co-worker addresses that are forwarded to me (just in case some legacy report or monitor was overlooked when addresses were updated when they left), and I'm also getting them on some work mailing list addresses (e.g., it@my_employer).
[1] https://subscriptions.economist.com/CE/affilinet_TCs.pdf
I receive multiple Economist spam emails a day, and none of them are from <>@economist.com, or a marketing firm. The TLDs alone give them away: <>@<>.faith, <>@<>.date, and so on. The links in the emails also go to the odd TLDs or to clearly bogus domains.
The links in the emails go to the odd TLDs, where they then redirect a few times ending up at The Economist with what appears to be affiliate tracking information in the URL, which I presume is so that the spamming affiliate will get paid if I subscribe at that point.
If I can figure out what email address @economist.com to report this to I'll send them a sample of one of the mails and the affiliate tagging information and hopefully they'll kick that affiliate out of their program.
> The Economist, whose editorial independence is absolute and is fiercely guarded by four independent trustees
Everyone says things like that. I hope it's true for them; there are few publications that are there equal and millions take them at their work.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/30603/20150203/faceook-los...
edit: http://www.economist.com/node/21541767
Reminds me of when Watson expesses sudden outrage at his newspaper description of himself as a 'confirmed bachelor' on the Sherlock TV show I bent over double laughing, utterly mystifying my friends.
But they're definitely more in tune with the Austrian school than with the Keynesians or the Krugmanites. Calling it a "left-wing weekly" is pretty questionable.
I think it's 1) more balanced than most 2) still not very balanced and 3) easy enough to sort out the facts from the liberal (in the global sense of the word) triumphalism.