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Comment by mixedbit | Hacker News Reader

After one year of subscribing to the Economist I like it, but would prefer if it was a monthly newspaper with 1/4 of the content. Reading it throughout each week takes quite a lot of my reading time and I have a feeling that dedicating this time to books would be better. Monthly with well selected topics would be enough to stay informed of important current issues.

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I definitely get a sinking feeling when I leave on vacation and come back to a two-issue backlog! There's more content in there than I typically consume in a week, so I've gotten more discerning on which articles I read. Skipping editorials, Britain, letters, and most columns seems to get it down to a manageable amount for my reading patterns. I also tend to skip any political coverage that's about what might happen in an upcoming election somewhere. I figure when it actually does happen I can read about it then.

This is a question for the folks who have been reading the Economist regularly for a while. What do you guys feel like you get out of reading the Economist over time? This is meant as a genuine question. So for example, I consume my news only via my Google News feed, so basically just a fast scan of the headlines and maybe a few news articles in depth. Does the Economist provide more details, more nuance, more depth? Do you guys feel it helps paint the bigger picture better then "regular" news media, a more erudite perspective?

A couple things, a lot of which boils down to them actually having journalists on staff who go out and research stories in person. A lot of digital outlets are just regurgitating Associated Press articles with little/no value add.

1) Breadth of coverage. The Economist is much more of a world magazine. When I scan Google News I get basically no Africa coverage. The economist has a section for it.

2) Depth of coverage. The Economist will have journalists reporting on location in places like China and India. They get direct interviews with people who are experiencing the phenomenon being reported on. I rarely if ever see that kind of reporting on Google News, especially not behind a paywall.

3) Better coverage of "slow burn" stories. e.g. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in Africa right now with infrastructure development. China has its big Belt and Road initiative that's more or less forced western governments to present a viable alternative or get boxed out. The west has bungled the response, and China is now dominant in financing new infrastructure projects throughout Africa. It will likely reap benefits for decades, both in economic and military positioning. There's no one "story" here to make a headline that would bubble up in Google News, but it's a really fascinating ongoing geopolitical saga.

4) Hitting interesting angles on stories. Last week there was an article about Russian troop buildup around Ukraine, but they wrote it from the angle of civilian surveillance technology. By stitching together private satellite imagery, TikTok and YouTube footage they were able to tell that troops that were ostensibly "withdrawn" had just been redeployed to other positions closer to the front. Using dash-cam footage posted to TikTok they were able to even identify specific armored divisions being moved up to the border. So I got a piece of current news (Russia is lying about its troop deployment), plus a piece of insight (in modern warfare citizens can learn about military movements without it being filtered through government entities).

5) This is not specific to the Economist, but the print format is so much nicer for me than digital. There's no temptation to check my email, or see what's on Hacker News (hah), or get drawn down some random digital rabbit hole.

More depth and nuance I say.

I find just skimming headlines gives me facts but facts are kind of useless. For example you could tell an alien that the average human drinks 1 cup of milk a day and the alien would have a fact but be completely unable to contextualize it.

Longer form articles help you contextualize it.

Of course, you still have to be careful that take into the account the unintentional bias of the source (i.e. a 3/day milk drinker would tell the alien that people don’t drink enough milk, and they’re not lying… they just see life through their own experiences).

So you really need a combo of regular news media for facts and a variety of longer form sources for contextualization.

Yojo's comment matches my feelings fairly well. I would add as a corollary to the better 'slow burn' coverage that they have less 'flash in the pan' coverage as well. I.e. the weekly format of their print edition tends to filter out the most ephemeral stories and gives them time to provide more in-depth coverage of the stories that still seem to matter a few days or weeks later. This, combined with the space constraints provided by their print edition gives me the impression that articles that make it to the print edition are probably worth my time to read, even in cases where I'm not particularly interested in the topic.

Things like Private Eye and (even worse) The London Review of Books have this issue. It's like having a bad debt and it weighs you down when you know you should deal to it.

I used to feel vaguely guilty (in a "there-are-starving-children-in-Africa" kind of way) when I didn't read the entirety of the issue I had paid for, but eventually I realized it didn't make any sense.

Sometimes I read almost the whole thing, but there are weeks when I skip more than 80% of the contents because of no time. One issue I'll always read cover to cover, though, is the Christmas special.

I know what you mean which is why I tend to buy it every other week. I still haven't finished the Christmas issue.

Some advice I picked up on HN which works well is to start at the back and make your way to the front.

I’ve been a subscriber for about fifteen years now. You triage the content. I rarely read more than half the magazine and that’s with spending >1hr on the subway every day.

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