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Very timely question, I just purchased an issue of the Economist because I was toying with the idea of re-instating a previously held subscription. I share the disappointment. In the past, even just the book reviews were so good that they "forced" me to buy 2-3 of the reviewed books; that issue didn't intrigue me. I don't have an answer whether it's a general trend or not, as I'm trained not to ascribe too much weight to a sample of size N=1. There's probably nothing better regardless, but I, for one, would like to see an alternative that is at the same quality level as the Economist (but with more neutral reporting and individual author names given) and an even wider scope (health, science, society, technology, geopolitics, finance, law, ...). I subscribed the Guardian for one year just to avoid that it goes down (I could read it for free at work), and of course it is excellent, but it has a tacit pro-UK bias that brits (esp. leftists) wouldn't even notice. On the other hand they have excellent reporting and do not refrain from the most challenging topics like the Snowdon revelation (first published by The Guardian's New York office, for legal - freedom of speech - reasons). Germany has Der Spiegel, France has Le Monde Diplomatique, but I think only the latter is available in English (I read German). I would also enjoy paying for a single subscription that gave me online access to several of these top-tier magazine for a single flat-rate monthly or annual subscription price.
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> …would like to see an alternative that is at the same quality level as the Economist (but with more neutral reporting and individual author names given)… More publications should remove the byline. Individual attribution incentivises journalists to try and stand out which typically means making intentionally inflammatory statements.
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Interesting, my first thought was that attribution will add accountability and authors would be more careful of their words.
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I am long-time fun of Economist, but unfortunately the quality decreases. E.g. last issue EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices. First, I find they did not explain their model well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Second, the correlation does not imply causation or whether extrapolations are solid. It looks like there might be mistakes on that front and there are many spurious correlations (e.g. high energy in the past might mean high unemployment). Third, so far the country experiencing freezing is the Ukraine due to power outages. Just one sentence mentioning, whether in Ukraine for sure many people are going to die due to distrusted power, heating or water supplies. So far on general economics, I love:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/ Though, it is hard for me to find comprehensive Economist replacement.
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Economist usually has some seriously bizarre articles about EU with a massive pro-USA bias when attempting any analysis. That ultimately made me stop reading it since it's not a very useful viewpoint if you actually live in Europe.
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Any examples? I'm a European with a pretty chauvinistic pro-EU meh-USA attitude and I've never found the Economist's Europe section to be "bizarre" (been reading for about a year)
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Interesting, on Twitter Noah Smith has become a laughing stock. I will say that generally, non-print media like Substack, personal blogs and Twitter can be a much higher quality replacement. Requires a little digging though.
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I've found the opposite. Print media publications seem to be higher quality with better editorial review. There are of course exceptions and outstanding blogs out there. I've seen some reporters go from working at a "big" publisher to Substack and I can tell the difference in their writing. Usually more extreme and alarmist. I chalk it up to less review.
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I go through cycles with the Economist, months when I can't stand it, and months when I read most pieces. Think it is me and the Economist. That said, I have not found any consistently better alternative in English or any of the other languages, so guess I am a lifer. But, I don't read pieces on current news in places I know well. My favorite section is letters to the editor. Like every time there is a piece on Singapore, the high commissioner will complain in the next issue.
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Could you give examples of how quality has declined? I'm scared if a rag like Jacobin is in the running.
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The alternative to The Economist is a well curated collection of RSS feeds. Identify a set of intelligent blogs/columnists who post regularly, put their feeds into an OPML file, and you have a great alternative. Added bonus: you can have X and anti-X perspectives for most values of X.
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I enjoy the Economist (haven't noticed any change in quality), and if I had time for a second source I would probably be leaning towards the New Statesman. I somewhat foolishly subscribed to the New European after learning about it on "The Rest is Politics" (podcast with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell); it is unashamedly far-left and mostly just full of rants - so I wouldn't recommend that.
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I bailed on the Economist a couple of years ago after at least a couple decades...thought I was the only one who felt it had declined. I haven't really found a good replacement still. If nothing else, the pain they put me through to end the subscription was enough to prevent me from ever signing up again.
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Their “customer retention” process is extremely aggressive, even by most traditional print publications’ standards.
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I canceled recently and had to escalate to “I have told you to cancel three times and if you cannot cancel now I will have to dispute the charges with my credit card company.”
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I have recently bailed too - I was subjected to multiple exit interviews when cancelling my subscription (two online and one over the phone). This certainly put me right off resubscribing at any point in the future.
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Guessing you're British or a UK resident? If you're not reading Private Eye already I would highly recommend it.
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Yeah, Private Eye pretty much the only essential publication in the UK for me.
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Satire and comedy panel shows (HIGNFY, Mock the Week, Daily Mash, etc.) have been a major source of news and debate for me over the last decade or so. The BBC appear to be reflecting this by cancelling all news related comedy shows on TV -- presumably following pressure from the Tory government? The BBC also appear to have put a month-delay on podcasts which prevents them from helping u inform opinions on recent news. These things limit democracy, IMO. I've found such shows (in the same way as Private Eye) will lampoon anyone and so seem quite well balanced. This all just seems to be one more data point on the chart that shows our UK government to be quite fascist.
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I believe the podcast delay is just for independent clients - you can still get stuff on they day if you use the BBC Sounds app. It's just a ploy to get more people on their app.
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> The BBC also appear to have put a month-delay on podcasts which prevents them from helping u inform opinions on recent news. Through what mechanism is the BBC able to delay podcasts?
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They make it available only on their app for a month, then publish it for everyone. It's just a commercial choice to capture more listeners for their apps.
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I think others have given good recommendations, but will add the Atlantic and New Yorker. Also agree that a problem with The Economist is that it is always overtly pushing a particular view of the view world (rooted in a faith in the rationality of markets), which is coupled with fairly strong advice/prescriptions in much of the writing.
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I kinda have the exact same experience with The Atlantic as OP does with The Economist. I used to read it regularly but now it feels there's 5% good articles and 95% some kind of highbrow clickbait. On the front page now: 1. Seven books that will make you smarter 2. Whoops, I Deleted My Life 3. How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life? 4. The Strength of the ‘Soft Daddy’ 5. The Black Investors Who Were Burned by Bitcoin These don't sound like articles that are worth my time. I did persevere with reading the magazine for quite a while out of habit but by now I'm pretty much convinced that most of these articles will be just as vapid as their titles.
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There is a difference in the online content of the Atlantic v. the print magazine. The print magazine still has some high quality content.
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> It doesn't align exactly with my political values Which values? I find it to be very analytic and dry in a good way.
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Maybe Foreign Policy? Can't say I've read any issues in the past few years, but back when I last read it, it appeared to fit your requisites reasonably well (perhaps a bit too US-centric for your liking). This chart shows FP as a more factual, slightly closer to the Center than The Economist (EDIT: Wrong) https://www.datawrapper.de/_/rrzFK/ Source for the chart: https://www.thefactual.com/blog/is-foreign-policy-magazine-r... EDIT: I misunderstood the chart. It shows FP as more factual and slightly more opinionated than The Economist, while labelling both as "Center" (without relative comparisons) ideologically.
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> slightly closer to the Center than The Economist.The center of US political debate is significantly to the right of Europe on a large set of topics (from the role of the State in economic matters to global issues like Israel's behaviour).
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What a timely post. My subscription to "The Atlantic" is coming up for renewal in a few months, and I plan to simply let it lapse. That was my last magazine subscription left standing, and 2023 will be the first time in roughly 40 years that I won't be subscripting to any magazines. The writing has always been center-left, but with introspective tendencies. Articles would generally critique conservative political positions, but thoughtfully in a well-reasoned manner. And they would be just as likely to examine excesses from the cultural left also. After Trump entered office, the magazine began a rapid descent. Today you find as much "clickbait" in the printed magazine as you do on the web property (they were previously quite distinct). Articles are frequently hyperbolic, and read like Reddit comments on /r/LateStageCapitalism. But most damningly, the REASONING seems to be gone now. It feels like reading a propaganda outlet. Maybe this is an artifact of emerging authors coming of age during the social media era? Maybe it's a byproduct of print media's financial decline, and pressure to compete with online entertainment? Whatever the case may be, everything feels like a lazy echo chamber now. I dearly miss writing that makes me think.
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I find Quilette - https://quillette.com/ very solid, all clear bylines so you can understand the background and perspective of the author.
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The Times Literay Supplement is high quality and always interesting. Everything is through the prism of book reviews so perhaps not as much current affairs as you’d like. But still worth looking at.
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I was in a similar place, an Economist subscriber, that stopped ~5yrs ago due to a decrease in writing quality. I switched to: Financial Times - lead newspaper into Wirecard scandal Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German) - famed for Panama Papers investigation I complement it with readings from: IEEE Spectrum (Science & Tech) The Markup (Society)
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You could look at the LRB (London Review of Books). While obviously it is mostly book reviews there are other essays in there too. The writing is rather literary, which may or may not be a positive, but it is entirely free of clickbait. It's probably the nearest thing to a left-wing equivalent of The Economist.
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Are you reading Le Monde Diplomatique in French? If so, you might enjoy Courrier International.
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I was a longtime subscriber of Courrier Internationale, in print. The issue is if many articles are originally in English then I feel like they should be read in English to avoid the nuances lost in translation. Second issue was the latency: the translation process first then getting it in print. The topic has to be a bit evergreen otherwise I feel the world has already moved on.
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Always been a fan of Harper's for a more left/artistic perspective.
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I've just renewed my subscription. I haven't found anything better than The Economist. Their daily news summary is great.
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I haven't seen it mentioned, but whenever I read articles from Foreign Affairs, I'm quite impressed. Though of course the focus is, as you may imagine, foreign affairs... I share your sentiment re Economist.
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What narrative manipulation have you seen from The Economist? I haven’t noticed it so perhaps I am being manipulated! I’d love to hear your insight!
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The Economist has always, since its foundation, been capital-L Liberal. That's the lens through which everything is written. Knowing that informs you about the selection of topics they cover and the angles they will take. It doesn't make it bad - I read it for years although gave up mid-2010s - but it can be quite predictable. It's still capable of producing very high quality and thoughtful writing, which makes it more annoying when they choose not to. Recommendation: maybe the FT?
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I’m very aware of political and economic lens of The Economist as I’ve been a subscriber for over two decades. I haven’t noticed a change other than a bit of a shift leftwards since Zanny became editor-in-chief, but I don’t mind one bit, as they haven’t lost the writers that promote classical liberalism, just added a bit of an internal critique of some aspects of academic economics. But I’m very open to the idea that I’m missing something… especially since I’m such a fanboy!
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The way they discuss the UK/EU dynamic rankles me. They spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about Europe, while talking about the UK as if it's on the cusp of a new age. I also loathe their coverage of the UK budget. It's a personally belief that George Osbourne's tenure in government has single-handedly sent the UK in a seemingly bottomless downward spiral back into 1970's Britain. He delivered his budget based on short-term fixes and populist gambits. The Economist talk about him and his policies as if he were some misunderstood hero of the age, and laud the absurd austerity measures of that government. Liz Truss recycles those same policies of tax cuts to the those who need it least, and the Economist does the same; that is, until the whole market finally comes crashing down. They back track as fast as they can, trying to distance themselves from her, talking about "how they would have done differently". It just seems so two-faced. These are just a couple of examples but in summary, when their own fundamental beliefs are shown to fail, be it social or economic, they change tact so as to appear in the right instead of owning up and admitting any fault.
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Anything that they write about France (or southern europe in general) is utter crap and often disproven by reality a few years later. It reeks of anglosaxon exceptionalism.
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They were and are right about Berlusconi though.
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From what I've casually noticed, in recent years they declared the EU dead at least 4 or 5 times and the bias towards some kind of Liberal US/UK lead/controlled World is clear. They are liberal and anglo, so of course the bias is there ( also smug, but that's pretty much since their beginnings) , but they try to pass their views as fact, meaning: "There's chat going around, this is what the reality is and will be.." They ( as many others ), didn't view Ukraine fighting back and Western help as a good thing, Ukraine capitulation was "the right thing to happen" because for them Russia controlling Ukraine was a "fact of life". All this while their authors try to project an image of unmatched economic prowess but also rock-solid morals..
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You must be reading a different magazine than I have because The Economist has been writing a lot about the need for the US and the West to provide military and economic aid in support of Ukraine!
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Yeah, I've been ready the magazine for more than a couple years. When "nothing is gonna happen" and business was good, there was the need to "support"/sell Ukraine stuff. When shit got real "It was important for the World to don't confront Russia and let it be", when Russia flubbed the military support for Ukraine needed to be much more! more!. I'm sure now that the war is extensive but also will be long, they'll try to push the "Listen.. you have to broke a deal with Putin." Every take they had over the years is in line with pretty much every tabloid. My main criticism is they pretend they are something else, some high society deep thinkers, when in reality they are not. They've missed every economic crash and found every one of it the same way all the others did.
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> They ( as many others ), didn't view Ukraine fighting back and Western help as a good thing, Ukraine capitulation was "the right thing to happen" Nearly every issue since February this year has contained calls to support Ukraine, titles like "Why Ukraine must win" and so on. They're very hawkish pro a Ukraine all-out victory, often describing Ukraine as fighting for all of Europe's (or even the entire West's) freedom.
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WSJ i read everyday and don't feel like i'm grating my brain against unlike other publications
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> Preferably something with a UK/Euro/Global focus, not just US. Probably something that is not in English language, since those usually have huge US or UK focus. (Even news like politico.eu are mostly about UK).
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zerohedge.com? /s It'd probably be FT for me, they follow a "just the facts" approach mostly.
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Though American and generally US-focused, The Atlantic covers a lot of world affairs, although isn't as news-rich as The Economist.
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The Atlantic's front page is so often covered with outrage pieces I decided to stop looking at it. It felt like they were constantly spinning stories to be fearmongering or anger mongering. There are undoubtedly good reasons out there to fear or be angry about but I just had to stop with The Atlantic. They do still have some great posts. I just avoid reading their homepage and only go there if linked to a post by a trusted source.
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Excellent, thanks for this. If I had the funds, I'd read everything from Adweek to Zeit Online, but paywalls mean I can only pick one or two.
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The Week is a bit more balanced- but you might find it better to set up a RSS reader and get info from different sources (I have used Inoreader Pro for a 4-5 years now and love it)
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Big fan of the Spectator and the Guardian Weekly: They the best exponents of right and left wing thinking from the UK respectively. For best results read both.
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I really like this mixed spectrum suggestion; it seems rare these days for people to do that, but perhaps I'm cynical and taking too much from online shouty types.
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I'm fine with The Economist's Classical Liberal POV (per Adam Smith et al). I unsubscribed become of their support for the Iraq War. (Which admittedly they regretted some years later. But I won't forgive them.) Fortunately, Western media (at least) is flush with Classical Liberal POV. So it's not like I suffered from the omission. As for challenging and interesting and immediately relevant, I keep returning to David Roberts' Volts podcast. Explains where the rubber meets the road on the most important topic of the day, climate crisis. The explainers are just terrific. The episodes about the US's Inflation Reduction Act, the most important industrial policy legislation in a generation, have been illuminating. https://www.volts.wtf Of course, economics is central to the whole story. As for a non-center-right take on economic issues, I'm enjoying Bethany McLean's work. Most recently her podcast Capitalisn't. https://www.capitalisnt.com (Her cohost Luigi Zingales is mostly a dink, so I speed thru his monologuing.) I haven't really found a leftist economics narrative to consume. Two years ago, I binged on some MMT stuff. Alas, it still feels too fledgling, too exploratory. In short, I'm eager for narratives with some predictive power. I'm almost certain u/dredmorbius can offer awesome recommendations. Their smart about about this kind of stuff. Oh. The books Mine: The Hidden Rules of Ownership and Debt: The First 5000 Years were fun. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54226795-mine https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt Sadly, I haven't gotten to Piketty's books yet.
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I think Le Monde Diplomatique could be a good choice
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Not sure what it's worth in English but the French version is indeed very good. My only complain is that they are sometimes a bit too complacent towards US rivals or competitors.
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The FT is excellent, particularly online.
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I feel like I asked HN the same question about the Economist a couple years ago. I still really appreciate its broad approach to world news and its slanted-but-two-sided view of politics. Honestly the replacement you're looking for
to understand international reality is probably some mix of very costly Stratfor briefings and France24 and DW. (Jacobin? seriously? is al Jazeera too well sourced for you?) Internal US politics aren't covered very well by the Economist so you won't be missing to much by switching to this blend, and most US politics can unfortunately be inferred six months in the future by watching other nascent authoritarian states anyway. Wait for it... Dang is gonna ban me again. BUT I'M DRUNK! Damn it.
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Wall Street Journal? It doesn’t have an euro focus though.
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The Spectator has
- generally high quality writing
- a quirky (but data driven) approach
- a longer history than any other magazine
- a UK focus
- a right wing bent, but with plenty of left wing ( or apolitical) writers for balance.
Might be a solution?
I gave up on the Economist after 20years 20 years ago, for much the same reasons you state!
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If you insist on "your newspaper" always to be right, you don't have many options, and not for long.
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If someone's complaint about The Economist includes that it is engaging in too much "narrative manipulation", suggesting The Spectator as an alternative is verging on performance art.
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The Spectator is hyper-partisan nonsense that will make you less well informed. I can't imagine who the "left wing" writers on it are supposed to be?
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