What The Economist gets -- and Time doesn't

Michael Hirschorn is surely correct when he writes, in the latest Atlantic, that virtually every "editor of a vaguely upscale magazine nurses a hard case of Economist envy." Indeed, Time's editor in chief, Richard Stengel, is on record as saying the esteemed and highly profitable British weekly is one of the models he's looking to as he tries to reinvent his own flagging brand.

So why then, Hirschorn asks, do these editors, in chasing The Economist, more often end up producing issues that read like knock-offs of The Atlantic, a magazine which, he wryly notes, "has never delivered impressive profit margins"?

It's because somehow they've got it into their heads that The Economist is about highbrow reporting and commentary, when, in fact, The Economist is a digest, a survey of information, much of it available elsewhere, which smart, busy people believe they need to stay abreast of (delivered, of course, with witty, Anglophile-attracting brio).

In other words, Hirschorn concludes, The Economist was parasitical on the traditional media long before bloggers got in on the game. Stretching the metaphor just a tad, we might even think of The Economist -- the print version -- as a blog "avant la lettre." (On the other hand, The Economist is fairly lazy as a digital entity, Hirschorn suggests.)

Presenting a news-and-analysis digest is simply not what the "new" Time and Newsweek are doing. They've been distracted by the good-writing part of the formula. Meanwhile, the humble magazine The Week, which is aping the digest model, minus The Economist's flair, has been the rare magazine success story of recent years.