IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.
The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.
Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site. The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro. And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.
The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.
If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.
Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.
Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.
NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.
Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.
While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).
NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.
FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared
Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBook.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”
Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”
It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.
NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.
No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.
He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site The Wrap listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.
NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.
Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.
In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.
NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.
The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.
The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”
While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.
A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his third decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.
And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.
Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.
MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker
Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.
After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.
Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.
NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.
Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: Polsky posted an item about the townhouse in TriBeCa that was once designated by John and Yoko’s as the “embassy” for their conceptual country of Nutopia, hitting the market for $3.25 million; the item got picked up by Beatles fan sites around the world.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: No whoppers, but mistakes happen, like the recent item where she mistakenly identified the firm behind the renovation of the developer Adam Gordon’s Jane Street town house.
Newsweek’s recent decision to get out of the news-digesting business and reposition itself as a high-end magazine selling in-depth commentary and reportage follows Time magazine’s emergency retrenchment along similar lines. It accelerates a process by which the 76-year-old weekly will purposely reduce its circulation from 2.7 million to a bit more than half of that. (Its circulation was nearly 3.5 million in 1988.) Likewise, Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to 5 million, is now at 3.4 million. Both newsweeklies are seeking to avoid the fate of U.S. News & World Report, which after years (decades?) of semi-relevance gave up on the idea of weekly publication entirely.
These tactical retreats by Newsweek and Time are brave stabs at relevance in a changing media environment. They’re also a decade late.
In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.
Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving? Virtually alone among magazines, The Economist saw its advertising revenues increase last year by double digits—a remarkable 25 percent, according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Newsweek’s and Time’s dropped 27 percent and 14 percent, respectively. (The Economist’s revenues declined in the first quarter of this year, but so did almost every magazine’s.) Indeed, The Economist has been growing consistently and powerfully for years, tracking in near mirror-image reverse the decline of its U.S. rivals. Despite being positioned as a niche product, its U.S. circulation is nearing 800,000, and it will inevitably overtake Newsweek on that front soon enough.
Unlike its rivals, The Economist has been unaffected by the explosion of digital media; if anything, the digital revolution has cemented its relevance. The Economist has become an arbiter of right-thinking opinion (free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism) at a time when arbiters in general are in ill favor. It is a general-interest magazine for an ever-increasing audience, the self-styled global elite, at a time when general-interest anything is having a hard time interesting anybody. And it sells more than 75,000 copies a week on U.S. newsstands for $6.99 (!) at a time when we’re told information wants to be free and newsstands are disappearing.
All of this suggests that although digital media is clearly supplanting everything analog, digital will not necessarily destroy analog. A better word might be displace. And The Economist’s success holds a number of lessons for dead-tree revanchists on how to manage this displacement.
The easy lesson might be that quality wins out. The Economist is truly a remarkable invention—a weekly newspaper, as it calls itself, that canvasses the globe with an assurance that no one else can match. Where else, really, can you actually keep up with Africa? But even as The Economist signals its gravitas with every strenuously reader-unfriendly page, it has never been quite as brilliant as its more devoted fans would have the rest of us believe. (Though, one must add, nor is it as shallow as its detractors would tell you it is.)
At its worst, the writing can be shoddy, thin research supporting smug hypotheses. The “leaders,” or main articles, tend to “urge” politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away. A typical leader, from January, on the ongoing Gaza violence was an erudite, deeply historical write-around on Arab-Israeli violence that ended up arriving at the same conclusion everyone else arrived at long ago: Israel must give up land for peace. The science-and-technology pages tend toward Gladwell-lite popularizations of academic papers from British universities. A February report on new scientific analyses of crowd behavior seemed to promise a fresh look at how police might deal with potentially rowdy mobs, but it quickly degenerated into an unsatisfying gloss on a British professor’s explanation of why some crowds become violent and some do not, with some syntax-obliterating hemming and hawing for good measure. (“And it is that which may help violence to be controlled.”)
Pieces like these tend to support the Economist-haters, who believe the magazine is simply conventional-wisdom-spewing crack for Anglophiles. But then you come across a brilliant exploration of the current drug-fueled violence in Mexico, offered in support of The Economist’s long-held position in favor of legalization, and you suddenly feel like you have a handle on the world that you didn’t have before.
The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.
True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.
For a magazine that effectively blogged avant la lettre, The Economist has never had much digital savvy. It offered a complex mix of free and paid content (rarely a winning strategy) until two years ago and was so unprepared for the Internet that it couldn’t even secure theeconomist.com as its Web domain. (It later tried, unsuccessfully, to claim the URL.) Today, access to the site is free of charge, excepting deep archival material, but while editors have made some desultory efforts at adding social-networking features, most of the magazine’s readers seem to have no idea the site exists. While other publications whore themselves to Google, The Huffington Post, and the Drudge Report, almost no one links to The Economist. It sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web.
This turns out to have been a lucky accident. Unlike practically all other media “brands,” The Economist remains primarily a print product, and it is valued accordingly. In other words, readers continue to believe its stories have some value. As a result, The Economist has become a living test case of the path not taken by Time and Newsweek, whose Web strategies have succeeded in grabbing eyeballs (Time has 4.7 million unique users a month, and Newsweek has 2 million, compared with The Economist’s 700,000, according to one measure) while dooming their print products to near irrelevance.
It’s no surprise, then, that the redesigned Time seems to bear an ever-greater resemblance to The Economist (its editor is on record as being a fan; and every other editor of a vaguely upscale magazine nurses a hard case of Economist envy). The revamped Newsweek, not yet unsheathed at press time, no doubt will as well.
As it happens, the new-look Time is quite a good read—my earlier prejudice against it, I’m sure, being a learned response similar to that of millions of others who came to see it as doctor’s-waiting-room fodder. Perusing a recent issue, I found a sharp essay on the changing ethical landscape of “Great Recession” America, and a terrific piece of reportage about how Detroiters are responding to the accelerating collapse of their city and, more generally, how cities should respond when significant chunks of their metropolitan area become unsalvageable.
But it takes time and millions of dollars, and possibly risible branding campaigns, to turn quintessentially middlebrow secondary reads into upper-middlebrow must-reads. And even as Time and Newsweek attempt to copy The Economist’s success, they seem to be misunderstanding what it is, exactly, that they should be copying. By repositioning themselves as repositories of commentary and long-form reporting—much like this magazine, it’s worth noting, which has never delivered impressive profit margins—the American newsweeklies are going away from precisely the thing that has propelled The Economist’s rise: its status as a humble digest, with a consistent authorial voice, that covers absolutely everything that you need to be informed about. (Tellingly, the very lo-fi digest The Week, which has copped The Economist’s attitude without any real reporting or analysis at all, is thriving as well.)
The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface. The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist.
Perhaps Time and Newsweek simply can’t mimic The Economist in function as well as form. The rapid marketplace shifts that are forcing the newsweeklies to retrench may have bled them of the resources necessary to imitate their British rival’s globe-saturating coverage—say, the reports on trade policy in Botswana; the 30-page specials on fusion energy in Indonesia; the correspondents who scamper (or give the impression that they’re scampering) across backwaters and remote deserts, spraying assured advice along the way like so much confetti.
But even if the newsweeklies had millions of dollars to throw at covering the world, their efforts probably wouldn’t be enough. Repositioning your brand today is so much harder than it was in the old days, especially when you’re destined to be seen as a copycat product. In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices. General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know—and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out—is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.
Michael Hirschorn is an Atlantic contributing editor.
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