Magazine Content

The Economist: The world represented in the pages of the Economist is big and sprawling. Different regions — the United States, Asia, Europe and others — are given their own sections and treated with roughly equal weight, suggesting to readers that the magazine looks at the news differently. There are no “national” or “foreign” sections in the Economist’s pages, there is just the world. Topics in Bhutan are given the same weight as those in Seattle . This absence of the “us and them” perspective leads to a decidedly different and perhaps more holistic view of the news.

The magazine is not just a recap of the week. Stories are joined together to try to make connections and create a larger context, even if they fall in different regional sections in the magazine. So a story in the “United States” section on terrorism might refer readers to pieces in the “Middle East” or “Europe” sections. There is also agenda-setting — stories on matters readers might know little about such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela , and biofuels. Lighter trend pieces, meanwhile, barely get space.

Beyond the personality differences, the magazine explicitly has a point of view; its editorials by themselves separate the Economist from its U.S. rivals. In American news weeklies it is what the writer thinks, not the magazine institutionally, that matters. The writers in American news weeklies, moreover, tend to have what journalists call a “take” on issues, but not clear positions. The Economist, by contrast, often urges actions and specific policies and makes endorsements. None of the pieces in the Economist even carry bylines. On its Web site, the Economist Group says the magazine “has no bylines, believing that what is written is more important than who writes it.”

From its text-driven nature to its U.K. headquarters, the Economist differs substantially from the other news weeklies, which may partly explain why it has made substantial inroads in audience here in recent years, while the U.S. magazines have struggled. Even the matter of how issues are dated is different in the Economist. It hits the newsstands three days before the Big Three.

Three of the “big stories” from May 11 make it into the May 20 Economist, though none is a stand-alone story. Instead, they are bits of information in larger stories about larger issues. For instance, there is a piece on Iraqi security forces that mentions the spike in violence in the country, and a short 10-line item in “The World This Week” in the front of the magazine touches the same topic. The news about North Korea bolstering its nuclear arsenal is part of the cover piece on the “Axis of Evil” as well as a nine-line item in “World this Week.” And the story about the obstacles to CAFTA is a 3-line brief and part of the larger article that opens “The Americas” section of the issue.

Cover — The Economist in this issue uses a week without a central headline to basically build one itself, based on two different events — North Korea’s announcement that it is preparing a nuclear test and Iran’s announcement that it is about to resume enriching nuclear materials. The cover line, “Return of the Axis of Evil,” and picture, a Muslim figure holding a mushroom cloud in his hands, are unlike the approach taken by the other titles. It is a contextualizing of different, not obviously related, events to create one story. And the four stories teased on the cover represent a diverse range of topics — “From Goldwater to Bush,” “Venezuela’s oil-rich troublemaker,” “A future for biofuels” and “ Detroit and the Unions.” All appear in different sections of the magazine.

The cover package is made up of two stories. A one-page editorial on the “Return of the Axis of Evil” outlines the stakes and urges action by the U.S. government. The Economist’s format also means that, technically, another part of the cover package is the lead story in the Middle East and Africa section later on that lays out specifically “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” — which frees up room for editorial commentary up front.

Other pieces — Listing all the articles in this issue would take up a lot of space. There are 71 — more than four times the U.S. average for this week — and the range of topics is vast, everything from the Los Angeles mayoral race to mining in China to French corporate governance.

In the May 20 issue the stories are, as always, short; three pages is a treatise here. The leads are taut and to the point, with lots of facts and figures. There are not a lot of scene-setting anecdotes or florid prose.

At the start of the book, the briefs are really brief, many less than 10 lines, and all are hard-news driven. The May 20 issue has no celebrity briefs, and international matters lead. Topics range from President Bush’s Russian trip to a summit of Arab and South American countries and the Senate’s passage of a resolution asking Nigeria to extradite the former Liberian leader Charles Taylor.

The Leaders section, where the magazine’s opening opinion essays appear, begins with the one-page “Axis of Evil” piece, then goes on to essays about India’s reformist prime minister, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, General Motors’ need to reduce labor costs, German shareholder activism and the Tories’ role in British politics. Following that is a three-page special section on Chavez, looking at the social gains his nation has made and the heavy hits democracy and economic development have taken. The nation has one foot in democracy and the other in autocracy, the article declares, adding that “Venezuelans must decide which foot they prefer to amputate.”

Even the United States section offers a different definition of news than U.S. weeklies. The first article is a one-page look at Antonio Villaraigosa, the new mayor of Los Angeles . It’s followed by a short piece on Jim West, the publicly anti-gay legislator in Washington State who was found to have engaged in homosexual activity, and a one-page piece on Paul Volcker’s investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal. There also is a one-page report on the decline of American unions, a short piece on how poor Americans have never saved money, a two-column story on faulty DNA testing in Virginia and a story on Chinese businessmen who are making inroads in the Midwest. The one-page Lexington column, which comes at the end of the United State section, talks about Republicans abandoning a small-government approach to management. The Jim West story was the only one the U.S. weeklies also covered.

It is not until page 62, that the magazine digs into business news – and that content diverges dramatically from what would have been found in American news weeklies. Among business’s eight pages is a one-and-half-page article on Intel and its new head, a two-column story on how American businesses are starting to take global warming seriously, a one-column item on the battle over the mobile e-mail business and a short item on how Kodak is struggling in the digital picture age.

There follows a three-page special report on the rise of biofuels that suggests it is time to take them more seriously as oil prices increase, a five-page Finance and Economics section and a three-page Science and Technology section. One needs to get all the way to page 85 (already longer than the entire issues of Time and Newsweek from May 23) before arriving at a three-page “Books and the Arts” section. Even here there are no celebrity interviews or film reviews. There are four one-and-a-half-column book reviews, a two-column article on new Asian cinema and a short item about a gallery exhibit of previously unseen Marilyn Monroe photos.

The issue still has room for a one-page obituary of Bob Hunter, the man who founded Greenpeace, and the Economist’s usual three pages of numbers, charts and tables that look at financial and economic indicators — something one would never find in any of the traditional American news weeklies. Again, some of that has to do with the magazine’s mission. It is a hybrid business/news title. But even taking that into account, the Economist simply treats news and the world it covers differently.

The Economist’s slogan is “First published in 1843 to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.’ ” That insistent attitude, aided by arch prose, sums up what the magazine aspires to.