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

51–60 of 151 posts

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

#51

Post by davidw »

LukeHoersten wrote: post #15

When I read about topics in which I have first hand experience, I feel The Economist does an excellent job of portraying the facts and different perspectives. This almost never happens in any mainstream media, especially regarding technology and trading. Therefore, I trust The Economist on topics in which I don't have first hand experience. They rarely let me down. I hope this continues and it seems they believe it w…

Yes - I recall reading it at a friend's house in the late 90ies, talking about open source software. I expected a bit more negative reaction from a business-oriented publication, but they had most of their facts right and seemed to have a pretty good take on things. I subscribed afterwards myself.

I also love the fact that they got into a legal tussle with Berlusconi after having called him not fit to lead Italy - and won!

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

#53

Post by jazzyk »

eddieh wrote: post #22
rm999 wrote: post #3

> Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, which has had a non-controlling 50% stake in us since 1928, is selling. Three-fifths of those shares will go to an existing shareholder—Exor, the holding company of the Agnelli family. The rest will be bought back by our parent company, The Economist Group. Phew, I was really worried they were selling to News Corp or something when I saw the headline. I've often thought of…

My sentiments exactly. It is a breath of fresh air to see a company depart from a huge multinational like Pearson. Somehow I wasn't aware that Pearson had a stake in the Economist and I frequent "Who Owns What" http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php . Now that I know I'm not subsidizing Pearson with my subscription, I'll be even happier to renew.

You will be subsidizing a few rich industrialist families instead, among them the Rothschilds, who increased their stake from 21% to 26%.

Thought you might want want to know :-)

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

#54

Post by crdoconnor »

Ollinson wrote: post #40
osipovas wrote: post #10

My life has changed for the better since subscribing to the Economist in 2011. For me, it's not about paying for content (which is great) but for the 'feeling of being informed'. After reading each issue I feel informed about what is going on around the world. This has sparked many conversations with people from around the world. I hope that following this transition that 'feeling of being informed' will not go away…

I subscribed to the economist sometime in the middle of 2012 and did not have a positive experience. I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source. I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts. The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a pol…

>I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source.

Contrarian to what? It follows the Washington Consensus pretty much religiously.

It also came out in favor of George Bush and the Iraq war in the beginning (when everybody else was) and against them after (when everybody else was also).

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

#55

Post by MichaelGG »

kbenzle wrote: post #43
molotv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key to reading the Economist is to go into it not planning to read the whole thing. My approach: Read all the short blurbs in the first couple of pages, then most of the 1/2 page articles that follow, note any that seem interesting, then seek out the longer versions deeper in the issue. As you work through the issue, skip or lightly skim the rest that don't spark interest.

Your "reading" it still, what is this 2005?? The audio edition is amazing! After three years of listening to every issue I think I may be picking up a British accent in my day to day life.

How does that help with time? Nearly everyone reading it is most certainly capable of reading far, far faster than listening, no? I suppose if you have an unfortunate, long commute, it might work, but otherwise?

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

#56

Post by eevilspock »

kanwisher wrote: post #31
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…

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 Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

We call ourselves hackers and innovators. Yet instead of pouring our energies into figuring alternative business models and micropayment solutions, we spend our energies on more ways to capture users in viral schemes and then collect their data for sale to advertisers.

As I wrote the other day: Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?

Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?

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.

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

#57

Post by Ollinson »

crdoconnor wrote: post #54
Ollinson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribed to the economist sometime in the middle of 2012 and did not have a positive experience. I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source. I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts. The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a pol…

>I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source. Contrarian to what? It follows the Washington Consensus pretty much religiously. It also came out in favor of George Bush and the Iraq war in the beginning (when everybody else was) and against them after (when everybody else was also).

Sticking to the theme of US elections, it also came out for Barack Obama in 2012. That's pretty contrarian considering The Economists history and Mitt Romney's policies on Wall Street.

The vast majority of economist articles can be summed up as "you thought it was that way, but it's actually this way."

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

#58

Post by pathy »

kbenzle wrote: post #43
molotv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key to reading the Economist is to go into it not planning to read the whole thing. My approach: Read all the short blurbs in the first couple of pages, then most of the 1/2 page articles that follow, note any that seem interesting, then seek out the longer versions deeper in the issue. As you work through the issue, skip or lightly skim the rest that don't spark interest.

Your "reading" it still, what is this 2005?? The audio edition is amazing! After three years of listening to every issue I think I may be picking up a British accent in my day to day life.

Yes! It is amazing!

I listen to it during my commute to work. Plus I get the issue on Thursday evening, as oppose to the physical copy that arrives Monday or Tuesday the following week.

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

#59

Post by tzs »

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 marking many of these with a score of around -2.4. They look so non-spammy that even though I keep feeding them to my "train spam" script I'm barely getting the score to move. (Occasionally one does come from an IP that is in a blocklist and so does get marked as spam)

I assumed they were probably phishing attempts, but all the links really do go to The Economist's website, and the ones in the mail that go to ordering pages use https and the certificate checks out.

My current guess is that it is a rogue affiliate, or possibly that The Economist is not doing a good job of policing their affiliates since the rules of their affiliate program [1] (assuming that's what those actually are) says that affiliates can send email to people in their own database, but that these must be approved by the merchant (which would be The Economist) prior to being sent. All the links when they end up at The Economist have a /AFF/DM appended which I'm guessing identifies the affiliate.

I'm absolutely certain that I did not subscribe to their affiliate's list because not only am I getting these at my home address, I am also getting them at my work address, AND I'm getting them at several former co-worker addresses that are forwarded to me (just in case some legacy report or monitor was overlooked when addresses were updated when they left), and I'm also getting them on some work mailing list addresses (e.g., it@my_employer).

[1] https://subscriptions.economist.com/CE/affilinet_TCs.pdf

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

#60

Post by Ollinson »

mdekkers wrote: post #49
Ollinson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribed to the economist sometime in the middle of 2012 and did not have a positive experience. I'm convinced that much of the allure of the economist comes from that it is frank contrarian news source. I don't like the anonymous authorship for reasons which have been stated on hacker news in other economist posts. The economist is sneaky. All of the articles are fact/numbers based and then shoehorned with a pol…

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.

The economist is very good at providing readers with the illusion of being informed.

Think about how multifaceted US policy is on any given day of the year. The economist boils down similar issues to a blurb on a page with a heading that says "middle east." So now you can turn that page and be confident that for this week you know what's going on in the middle east.

The truth is the economist fills a void. Before reading an issue you know nothing about current events in India. After reading you know something. Something is vastly more power than confessing ignorance in any situation. And if anyone questions you, well, the economist said so.

Post reply on HN