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Comment by papaver-somnamb | Hacker News Reader

After reading their newspaper (their label, not mine) for years, I've come away with three revelations: A) More than gaining insight and staying abreast of events, what I was really purchasing was the /feeling/ of being in-the-know. B) Whenever I met with "certain" people, they were likely to also read The Economist which turned out to be another, tremendously handy means of anchoring conversation. C) The trade balance tables on the inside back page were always interesting, sometimes jaw-dropping.

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This but for every major "serious" publication

The Economist is to the City of London (the financial center masquerading as a local authority, not the metropolis) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party. Useless as a source of truth, but invaluable to find out who was going to be purged and you should disown stat. Similarly The Economist is useful as a barometer of conventional wisdom in as very specific demographic. Their science and arts section can be very good at times, however.

I find that publications aimed at business people to be a bit more reliable since their readers jobs are to make money and not have their biases confirmed. If the media isn’t useful in helping them make money (by giving them too much bad information), they will simply stop using it.

Of course, making money doesn’t necessarily mean having access to the best unbiased information, sometimes it simply means onboarding onto a bias before everyone else does (aka market intelligence).

This is why (in the US anyway) The Business Journals are fantastic. Also, they're extremely localized, which is most stuff of direct relevance anyway. Absolutely love those publications.

The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.

+1 on C. I actually started reading it back to front and have been having much more fun.

Obituary first?

That obituary will be on the cover.

and if its on the cover chances are you won't need to even see the mag since everyone everywhere will be talking about it

The obituary is not for learning who has died, but for getting to read an interesting article about them.

I do too, I picked that idea up from HN. I often don’t get to the front for three or four weeks which makes the news part interesting. Last week I read a piece from early in the Iran/US war and it was telling me I wouldn’t be able to buy petrol by then but the reality was prices were already falling off.

If you read it consistently you soon realize that every article has a short form summary in the front and long form article in the back, and sometimes a mid size as well, in the same edition.

The economist is the only paper I read where articles on topics I know about are fair, balanced and grounded in science. The opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

You'd probably enjoy the Financial Times

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