I have been a subscriber to the Economist for, woah, 11 years now. Simply by virtue of its weekly format, it does a good job of ignoring a lot of the interesting-but-transient stuff that wastes your time if you read regular news online. It also has great breadth of coverage -- it's easy to get parochial when you read online news, especially tech, and the E is a reminder that the rest of the world exists and that important things are happening in it.

However, the breadth seems to often come at the expense of depth -- on the occasional chances I get to discuss an article in the Economist with an actual expert in that field, it seems their analysis is often dismissed as superficial and they not-infrequently get basic facts wrong (their letters section often contains quite substantial corrections).