Its current circulation is 1.3 million. Its operating profits are up 25 per cent; revenues up 4 per cent in the first six months of this financial year. It is a magazine that calls itself a newspaper. It is sober yet witty and carries only a few bylines. Yet, with more than half its copies being sold in the United States, it seems to be doing what even Time and Newsweek are finding difficult in a gloomy news market.
So what accounts for the success of The Economist?
Roy Greenslade seems to suggest in the London Evening Standard that it may be that in an era of news and information overload, the Economist not only reports the news but unabashedly says what it thinks about it:
“The magazine is a little like the BBC World Service, dispensing well-informed reports about what is happening around the globe to the people who need to know or, just possibly, those who think they should know. The difference is that The Economist comes at matters with a strong point a view. It is, genuinely, a viewspaper with a strong commitment to the free market.”
Read the full piece here: The Economist is wowing America
Graphic: courtesy Evening Standard
IJR 