Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 151 posts

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#121

Post by anigbrowl »

NearAP wrote: post #107
mdekkers wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was subscribed to the economist for several years, and unsubscribed once I figured out that much of their content on non-western countries is either heavily tinted, or outright false.

This year, I read an article in The Economist where they endorsed the opposition candidate (Buhari) for the upcoming Presidential election in Nigeria. The article stated that Buhari had thrice contested before and lost the presidential elections and each time accepted the verdict. But that turned out to be false (and the comments in the article said so but Economist did not update the article). Each time Buhari lost…

ISTM you're both right. To challenge election results all the way up to a country's Supreme Court, if one has the right to do so, is to accept the institutional verdict on the outcome while disputing the initial outcome (of the vote count). In many developing countries, unwanted election results are followed by rioting, coup attempts, or highly public sulks and political maneuvering often enough that it's a problem for stability.

Mounting a challenge within an institutional or constitutional framework is qualitatively different - it puts the rule of law above pure power politics.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#122

Post by ggchappell »

plg wrote: post #28

The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market. Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements? PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue. PPS I feel the same way ab…

> The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market.

It certainly is. But I wonder how much their strategy can really serve as a model for others.

On the one hand, the Economist might be seen as saying, "Here is how to do it." Others can follow and similarly prosper, with increasingly large markets being served.

Or, on the other hand, the Economist might simply be meeting all of the demand for a publication like itself. And the only way for another company to do as well using the same strategy, would be to produce a publication that is convincingly better than the Economist, thus putting the original out of business.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#123

Post by fweespeech »

dredmorbius wrote: post #111
fweespeech wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News Corp biases its companies in favor of News Corp. The Economist has always been the hallmark of an independent newspaper that published a consistent of opinions in line with reality. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/news-c... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/21/attacks-on-abc-... And I don't think anyone reasonable believes Fox is anything but a Conservatives-centric news network tha…

The Economist does in fact have a marked and explicit editorial mission to promote free trade principles, set forth in their Prospectus[1], specifically, that "ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agricu…

There is a world of difference between a group with the integrity to state its biases publicly and one that hides them in a dozen puppet papers.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#124

Post by hackuser »

plg wrote: post #28

The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market. Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements? PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue. PPS I feel the same way ab…

I agree. I'd go further and say that the NY Times is the world's best English-language newspaper, with the possible exception of the Financial Times. I think much of the criticism comes from two issues:

1) Newspaper journalism is very hard; look at how much new research (i.e., almost everything they publish outside the editorial page) they publish every day; they're going to get a few things wrong and make a few errors in judgment. However, name a paper that does this job better.

2) The ideological right-wing, trendy in some places (e.g., News Corp publications such as Fox News and the Wall St Journal), in their effort to discredit any source of information for their followers but themselves, have tried to politicize the NY Times. After all, the NY Times prints facts, and those are always a threat to any ideology.

That said, some errors, such as during the leaup to the Iraq War, are inexcusable (but what papers did better?[1]). They're the best, but they could improve a lot.

[1] I think the one answer might be McClatchy's (a leading owner of local papers) DC bureau. Highly recommended for their courage on unpopular questions and for their integrity. A very underappreciated resource: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/

----

The Economist and NY Times do two different jobs. The Economist provides analysis; the NY Times generates and presents new knowledge (i.e., journalism), essentially for you to do your own analysis.

For example, the NY Times researches and breaks the story on NSA wiretapping; the Economist provides context and analysis of it (think about it: Have you ever seen the Economist break a story?). The NY Times interviews the head of the NSA, telecommunications companies, privacy adocates, etc. and provides their responses to you. The Economist summarizes and analyszes the responses (think about it: how often do you see quotes in the Economist?).

I'm not criticizing one or the other; both have their place. My perspective: The Economist approach is more efficient (someone does the analysis for you) but is more prone to bias (e.g., they apply their free market ideology everywhere). The Times approach is essential (someone has to create the new knowledge) and less prone to bias, but you need to read a lot more to understand the same story.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#125

Post by amirmc »

atmosx wrote: post #76
plg wrote: post #28

The Economist is a prime example of how for-pay curated content can work and can work well to serve a market... a wide market. Can you imagine, just imagine, how craptastic The Economist would be if it were "free" and all you had to do was endure curated advertisements? PS I would pay extra if they would stop stapling in those cardboard subscription cards in the middle of the (print) issue. PPS I feel the same way ab…

I was a subscriber for 4 years and I can confirm that the Economist is crap. It looks good compared to other choices like 'Times' or 'Newsweek' which are totally unreadable. * It has totally absurd double-standards: Russia, Iran, China and their puppets (e.g. Syria and so forth) are 'bad' and 'evil'. US, EU and the UK stand for 'justice and peace in the world'. If your world-view is so naive, then you deserve the eco…

> "I don't know if the editor changed after 2004, but me and many other readers have the feeling that after 2004-5 the quality dropped incrementally."

I'd concur with this. Even though I disagreed with some of the articles I found them to be well written/edited and I'd learn about different viewpoints (so I subscribed). They even published a style guide. I don't recall when but I started to feel that they (ironically) stopped following their own style guide and around the same time the quality began to drop.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#126

Post by hackuser »

I think people don't grasp the enormous influence publishers of news have, and thus the signifance to everyone of who owns them, their politics, integrity, and whether they will insist on journalistic integrity or compromise it. I see many, many people repeating what is effectively propaganda from News Corp publications (Fox and the Wall St Journal), competely unwittingly. The public seems surprisingly easy to manipulate, and few seem to care for accountability from their news sources.

> The Economist, whose editorial independence is absolute and is fiercely guarded by four independent trustees

Everyone says things like that. I hope it's true for them; there are few publications that are there equal and millions take them at their work.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#127

Post by eevilspock »

dredmorbius wrote: post #120
eevilspock wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay. We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads. The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Fa…

Micropayment solutions don't work, won't work, and will never work. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

That's been said of a lot of things.

We probably wouldnt even have the internet if people always believed pronouncements that seem to be irrefutable, but in truth rest on narrow assumptions or narrow thinking.

Think out of the box.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#128

Post by sysk »

eevilspock wrote: post #56
kanwisher wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economist is the only publication i pay for. I'm not sure how many newspapers/magazines could really follow suit. There is only so many high quality sources anyone can read, its a small niche I think. Also the average economist reader is probably quite high on income so I suspect thats a skews their ability to charge

Quality and accountability is what happens when we pay. We've traded quality and accountability for "free" garbage floating in a sea of ads. The NYTimes is still too dependent on advertising. That they consider "native advertising" acceptable shows compromised journalistic principles. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Fa…

> The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast.

What? I don't think I've ever read a positive comment about ads on HN. Also, I'm apparently in the only one on HN who would rather see ads than pay for stuff.

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#129

Post by projectileboy »

igravious wrote: post #93
bradleyjg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job the Times has is at least an order of magnitude harder than the Economist . I enjoy reading the Economist , but I don't know if I'd say well researched. A few times I've come across articles in my own field that seem really off, which makes me uneasy about the articles on banana plantations in Uruguay. AFAIK the gold standard in copy editing and fact checking is the New Yorker .

The New Yorker has a sterling reputation what it comes to copy editing, not sure if they have the same reputation regarding fact checking. The New Yorker isn't a destination for me though whereas the Economist most certainly is one of the few sites I will directly type into the URL bar in a browser, I buy their end-of-year year in review religiously, I am neither politically nor economically aligned with them but the…

I believe the New Yorker takes fact checking reasonably seriously: http://www.cjr.org/critical_eye/fact-checking_at_the_new_yor...

Re: For only the second time in our history the ownership of The Economist changes

#130

Post by jaskerr »

tzs wrote: post #59

Speaking of The Economist, is anyone else getting a ridiculous amount of third party spam pushing The Economist subscriptions? I'm getting several a day, typically from domains in the new TLDs, such as .date, .science, .faith, and .review. The domain names match the IP addresses, have SPF records that check out, and they body doesn't have any of the usual things that make it look like spam, and so Spamassassin is mar…

Be sure to check the origin/return address before you blame the Economist.

I receive multiple Economist spam emails a day, and none of them are from @economist.com, or a marketing firm. The TLDs alone give them away: @.faith, @.date, and so on. The links in the emails also go to the odd TLDs or to clearly bogus domains.

Post reply on HN