STS : No gossip but The Economist is a hot-seller
Yap Yok Foo
23 July 2003
No gossip but The Economist is a hot-seller
DAVID SHAW
LOS ANGELES TIMES
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 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 per cent in the
last 10 years. In the United States - by far The Economist's largest
market - circulation is 352,000, up 81 per cent in the same period.
Business Week increased just 23 per cent 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 US$102.51 (S$181) - two to three times more than its competitors' -
The Economist's circulation continues to climb, especially in the US.
Annual profit for The Economist now approaches US$40 million.
So how has an expensive, serious, elitist publication that looks like
a magazine in every way - size, format, colour 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 US$100 subscription is but
a drop in the champagne bucket. Their median household income is
US$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 the other magazines, and those facts may help explain even
more clearly the reasons for The Economist's success.
We live in complex, troubled times, in an increasingly fractious
world, and The Economist appeals directly to well-educated,
well-travelled sophisticates eager for information, analysis and
intelligent opinions on what it all means.
'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 US for what we provide,' Mr 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 US, and readers of The Economist didn't
need to have the Taleban or Saddam Hussein explained to them.'
Mr Emmott traces the growth of The Economist in the US in part to the
'dumbing down' of other US 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 is dumbing down, but the American people are not dumbing
down,' Mr 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.'
The Economist tries to resist ideological pigeonholing. It strongly
supported the US war in Iraq, but its 'leaders' - the British term for
editorials - have been increasingly uneasy over the failure of US and
British forces to find weapons of mass destruction, and last week's
cover story/leader - they're sometimes the same - strongly criticised
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 US$5 (a barrel)'.
As Mr 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 per cent.'
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.
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 Mr 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?'.
For all its British sensibility, The Economist sells only 17 per cent
of its copies in Britain. It is a truly international magazine,
despite its thoroughly parochial roots.
Founded in 1843 by Mr 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 also culture, science
and technology. It has also changed its format - most recently in May
2001, when a redesign brought colour, a better index and other
streamlining to its pages.
'Still, we've always thought of ourselves as a weekly newspaper,' Mr
Emmott says. 'There is no tradition of news magazines 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.'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Bliar?
IN LINE with its irreverent style, The Economist took a dig at British
Prime Minister Tony Blair in a recent story on whether there really
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The magazine's circulation
rose 73 per cent in the last 10 years to 880,000
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/
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