Moderator’s note: I’ve added the chart from Journalism.org, where you can go for a better look at it. – D.R.
In politics, “elitist” is now an epithet, surpassing even “liberal” as a description to be shunned. In the media, however, the “elitist” sector is doing better than most of the mass purveyors of news: the networks, news magazines, and the metropolitan newspapers that flourished so long as all things to all people.
Three leading elite publications come to mind, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the New Yorker. All of them are financially strong, albeit in the case of the Financial Times and New Yorker, after a period of losses. All of them have readers notable for their loyalty (and growing numbers) who are attractive to advertisers for their up-market demographics. And significantly, all of them provide journalism that is very good. Despite tony, Anglophilial reserve that can veer towards fustiness, they have avoided the image of being only for older readers. The New Yorker somehow managed to go from moribund to hip without losing its basic look or persona.
Three other publications serving the same English-language international audience also seem to be doing well, each serving a specific niche. Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly published by the Council on Foreign Relations, has the highest circulation in its history. The New York Review of Books is choc-a-bloc with ads while newspaper-based book reviews are struggling, and Vanity Fair has held its own now for more than two decades courtesy of Tina Brown and Graydon Carter and offering a mix of first rate narrative writing and well, lesser stuff.
Meanwhile, the largest circulation of all American elite publications—the Wall Street Journal—is undergoing a fundamental re-invention at the behest of perhaps the most successful mass marketer of news in history: Rupert Murdoch. The departure last week of the Journal’s managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, removes any conceivable doubt that the newspaper will be a vastly different and much more “popular” paper in the next year. Murdoch’s London Times and Sunday Times are almost certainly the model. They have the brand names and superficial appearance of “quality” newspapers, but their content, set against the similarly British based Financial Times and Economist, offer much less real substance.
The shorter story and general interest model that Murdoch intends to impose on the Wall Street Journal has a signature style. Fox News has established its particular voice, shifting the whole tone and style of cable and most network news. (The visibility of BBC World News on cable is a welcome counterpoint.) Despite losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the New York Post has had an enormous effect on the spread of gossip and tabloid intrusiveness throughout the news world in print and on the Web.
Betting against Murdoch to get his way and eventually to succeed in imposing his will has continuously turned out to be wrong. In the “mass vs. class” contest, Murdoch finds a way to degrade the meaning of class without necessarily forgoing the superficial appearance of it. So predicting that the Wall Street Journal will fail in its new guise is probably wrong. The stated conviction of taking on the New York Times’ dominance of the national and international audience for quality, however, seems an awfully big reach. But his objective will doubtless be a relief to his main competitors in the area of purely business news—Bloomberg, the new Reuters-Thomson behemoth, and the smaller Financial Times.
Going up-market has its benefits in the news business: you can charge more. The newsstand price of the New Yorker is $4.50, the Economist is $5.99, and the daily Financial Times is $2.00. (Subscriptions for all are deeply discounted.) Advertisers certainly like affluence, and journalists (of a certain type) like pitching their stories to sophisticated readers. In this age of pervasive populism, why are these publications doing so well? Because, I think, they know, unapologetically, who they are and stick to that model rather than chase the revenues of mass outlets. Consistency without inertia seems to be the key. All of them have also added supplemental businesses in things like high-priced conferences and spin-offs that are revenue builders.
More than twenty-five years ago, I wrote a feature in the Washington Post about the Economist that reported that the magazine was then booming by its modest standards. At the time, the circulation had doubled in a decade to about 200,000, one-third of which was in the United States. Now the circulation is 1.3 million, two-thirds of which is American. What I wrote in 1982 was that “compared with great media giants in the United States, those figures are small change. But The Economist makes no claim to be big. It just aims to be smart.” The success of the elitist publications shows that smart still sells—even if you can’t run for president by saying so.
Related: How different is Murdoch’s new Wall Street Journal?—from Journalism.org. – D.R.
Moderator: Peter Osnos is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project. Reproduced with permission from a regular Osnos column called The Platform. – D.R.
I don’t know about elitist but I can vouch for both the New York Review of Books and The Economist as being superb examples of what writing and reporting should be about. In both instances, I’m one of those long-term subscribers, prepaying for subscriptions that have another 5+ years to run for each. It is a sad commentary on our society that with these few exceptions, the way to survive in the reporting business is to be as partisan as possible and as dumbed down as possible.
Ok, I agree that Economist is high quality, but its annual subscription is 5x that of Time magazine. I think Time magazine writers are the best (as is Newsweek), but the strait jackets the editors put on writers makes what they write seem puerile. I’d match Karen Tumulty and Richard Corliss against anything in the Economist any day. The main problem are those crappy cover story puff pieces about “Did Comets kill the Dinosaurs?” or the biannual “Startling New Archeological Find Uncovers Evidence of Moses/Jesus/Abraham.
Another point. Ebooks seem like a good way to cut production/mailing costs for niche publications. If Economist/Foreign Affairs offered ebook versions with a substantial price reduction (33% or more), I would definitely consider subscribing.
Then again, I have a feeling that soon the educated and well-to-do will do most of their reading from ebook devices anyway.