Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?
As such, I'm debating on an alternative that fills the niche it has beside my morning coffee. My question to you all is, does anyone have favorite of theirs that is comparable in quality, breadth, and is available in print not just digital? Preferably something with a UK/Euro/Global focus, not just US. Anything that keeps me relatively well informed, while sparking some intellectual curiosity, and teaching me something I didn't already know.
So far the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the Jacobin, le Monde Diplomatique, and the New Statesman are all in the running, so I'd like opinions from readers of those and how it compares. Tech-first magazines are also interesting to me, but I'd like at least some political news scattered within if possible.
319 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadIt doesn’t have an euro focus though.
Rod Liddle - his brain is addled by the booze, but he still manages to phone in a few hundred words each fortnight.
Just objectively that has turned out to be complete nonsense...
If you're not reading Private Eye already I would highly recommend it.
This all just seems to be one more data point on the chart that shows our UK government to be quite fascist.
Through what mechanism is the BBC able to delay podcasts?
This has been clear for years, but perhaps there is a new urgency at the top to impress their new masters.
A lot of British comedians - at least those trying to be topical, frankly suck, with no obvious reason for their rise to fame over your average pub "wit" beyond plugging away, saying the right things, and being chums with the right people; the stronger shows succeeding despite their presence rather than because of them.
Knowing that informs you about the selection of topics they cover and the angles they will take. It doesn't make it bad - I read it for years although gave up mid-2010s - but it can be quite predictable. It's still capable of producing very high quality and thoughtful writing, which makes it more annoying when they choose not to.
Recommendation: maybe the FT?
I haven’t noticed a change other than a bit of a shift leftwards since Zanny became editor-in-chief, but I don’t mind one bit, as they haven’t lost the writers that promote classical liberalism, just added a bit of an internal critique of some aspects of academic economics.
But I’m very open to the idea that I’m missing something… especially since I’m such a fanboy!
That may just be selection bias of the articles I read.
They ( as many others ), didn't view Ukraine fighting back and Western help as a good thing, Ukraine capitulation was "the right thing to happen" because for them Russia controlling Ukraine was a "fact of life". All this while their authors try to project an image of unmatched economic prowess but also rock-solid morals..
When "nothing is gonna happen" and business was good, there was the need to "support"/sell Ukraine stuff. When shit got real "It was important for the World to don't confront Russia and let it be", when Russia flubbed the military support for Ukraine needed to be much more! more!.
I'm sure now that the war is extensive but also will be long, they'll try to push the "Listen.. you have to broke a deal with Putin."
Every take they had over the years is in line with pretty much every tabloid. My main criticism is they pretend they are something else, some high society deep thinkers, when in reality they are not. They've missed every economic crash and found every one of it the same way all the others did.
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2022-04-02
Nearly every issue since February this year has contained calls to support Ukraine, titles like "Why Ukraine must win" and so on. They're very hawkish pro a Ukraine all-out victory, often describing Ukraine as fighting for all of Europe's (or even the entire West's) freedom.
Just as an example, did you read the things Mearsheimer wrote?
Since this Economist thing has become a quagmire due to Ukraine ( my fault for bring it up ), I reiterate my point:
I don't really have anything against them, not even their biases. I do get pissed when they somehow ride their wave of superiority when in fact they are pretty much mainstream. Yeah, they are better than the DailyMail, but not by the amount they project.
Yes, the print edition. Care to actually rebuke my arguments instead of making assumptions?
> Just as an example, did you read the things Mearsheimer wrote?
I googled this because I was confused because I could not remember seeing his ideas there (which I remember finding totally ridiculous). Turns out this was a "by invitation" section, clearly presented as an outside opinion. I haven't seen them reiterate his ideas anywhere (which I'd summarize as "it's totally OK for powerful countries to scare neighbours into becoming 'buffer zone' client states without any say in the matter"), they're very much for Ukraine's ability to determine their own future.
If you're angry about a paper publishing opinion pieces you're going to be angry about just about every paper out there because every one of them is going to sooner or later publish an opinion piece that you disagree with. That's the whole idea of opinion sections.
I also loathe their coverage of the UK budget. It's a personally belief that George Osbourne's tenure in government has single-handedly sent the UK in a seemingly bottomless downward spiral back into 1970's Britain. He delivered his budget based on short-term fixes and populist gambits. The Economist talk about him and his policies as if he were some misunderstood hero of the age, and laud the absurd austerity measures of that government. Liz Truss recycles those same policies of tax cuts to the those who need it least, and the Economist does the same; that is, until the whole market finally comes crashing down. They back track as fast as they can, trying to distance themselves from her, talking about "how they would have done differently". It just seems so two-faced.
These are just a couple of examples but in summary, when their own fundamental beliefs are shown to fail, be it social or economic, they change tact so as to appear in the right instead of owning up and admitting any fault.
Also agree that a problem with The Economist is that it is always overtly pushing a particular view of the view world (rooted in a faith in the rationality of markets), which is coupled with fairly strong advice/prescriptions in much of the writing.
On the front page now:
1. Seven books that will make you smarter
2. Whoops, I Deleted My Life
3. How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?
4. The Strength of the ‘Soft Daddy’
5. The Black Investors Who Were Burned by Bitcoin
Etc.
These don't sound like articles that are worth my time. I did persevere with reading the magazine for quite a while out of habit but by now I'm pretty much convinced that most of these articles will be just as vapid as their titles.
I would definitely appreciate a quality/triviality filter though, maybe the print is the only way to get it.
I like The Atlantic in general, although I think they have a bit of what I sometimes call a "contrarian bias", e.g., prioritizing "the conventional wisdom is X, but here's why it's wrong" think-pieces even when their theses aren't particularly strong. (Slate and Salon were much worse about that in their heyday.)
Financial Times - lead newspaper into Wirecard scandal
Süddeutsche Zeitung (in German) - famed for Panama Papers investigation
I complement it with readings from:
IEEE Spectrum (Science & Tech)
The Markup (Society)
I think you're better off just getting access to specific long read articles when they're released.
In the past, even just the book reviews were so good that they "forced" me to buy 2-3 of the reviewed books; that issue didn't intrigue me. I don't have an answer whether it's a general trend or not, as I'm trained not to ascribe too much weight to a sample of size N=1.
There's probably nothing better regardless, but I, for one, would like to see an alternative that is at the same quality level as the Economist (but with more neutral reporting and individual author names given) and an even wider scope (health, science, society, technology, geopolitics, finance, law, ...).
I subscribed the Guardian for one year just to avoid that it goes down (I could read it for free at work), and of course it is excellent, but it has a tacit pro-UK bias that brits (esp. leftists) wouldn't even notice. On the other hand they have excellent reporting and do not refrain from the most challenging topics like the Snowdon revelation (first published by The Guardian's New York office, for legal - freedom of speech - reasons).
Germany has Der Spiegel, France has Le Monde Diplomatique, but I think only the latter is available in English (I read German).
I would also enjoy paying for a single subscription that gave me online access to several of these top-tier magazine for a single flat-rate monthly or annual subscription price.
More publications should remove the byline. Individual attribution incentivises journalists to try and stand out which typically means making intentionally inflammatory statements.
Media owners want this. They want journalism to be commodities because journalists with reputations can demand higher pay. They can then claim more of the profit.
The losers are the readers and the journalists.
In a sense it's the same process that is turning amazon products into shit. Without trustworthy reputation signals, the lowest common denominator rules.
Or...journalists without a byline have little incentive to "build up a brand" through by appealing to a "side" or sketchy reporting. It cuts both ways.
Taking away bylines simply takes away the incentive to actually be different and stand out for something else.
I think the biggest predictor of quality writing is the business model of the publication. Subscription based content is almost always superior. Anything that relies entirely on ad revenue is general hot garbage.
A good way to see that it's not is to find out what investors or beltway policy elites would think and hunt for (entirely factual) things which might contradict their narrative.
I cited an example below of an article about github copilot that was hot garbage - like a starry eyed intern had watched an investor pitch.
On the war front one of the things which I have read in milbloggers is that a key goal of Russia's bombardment of the electricity network is to inhibit Ukrainian rail logistics and prevent the front from being resupplied. Is it working? Well, it was only ever "meant" to crack Ukrainian morale so they wouldnt even think to analyze that.
(good military reporting ought to have a bias towards logistics, but it rarely does...)
The end goal is to undermine international support for Ukraine.
While Le Diplo's writers are usually top rate and the international outlook extraordinary for a French publication, the caricatural "anticapitalist" and anti-USA stance tint it too much to my taste - and I'm saying that as a French socialist !
[1] https://www.sofoot.com/
When I originally used to read The 'Graun' back in the 80s 90s, it was a crusading paper which did cover 'challenging topics' --such as Britain's role in Northern Ireland, US bases in Europe, Britain's membership of NATO, nuclear disarmament, class struggle, etc. etc. ie. proper socialist politics.
Now, whenever I look at their website all I see are endless articles about racism, hompophobia, transgenderism... whether what X said on Twitter was racist... whether Y's opinion on sport is transgenderist etc. etc. Issues which the current crop of Guardian journalists probably think are terrifically 'crusading' and 'challenging' but which are just pushing at the same open door as every other 'right on' publication and website around and which I find tedious beyond measure. Virtue signalling trivia masquerading as crusading journalism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_jokes_in_Private_Eye
First, I find they did not explain their model well. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Second, the correlation does not imply causation or whether extrapolations are solid. It looks like there might be mistakes on that front and there are many spurious correlations (e.g. high energy in the past might mean high unemployment).
Third, so far the country experiencing freezing is the Ukraine due to power outages. Just one sentence mentioning, whether in Ukraine for sure many people are going to die due to distrusted power, heating or water supplies.
So far on general economics, I love: https://noahpinion.substack.com/
Though, it is hard for me to find comprehensive Economist replacement.
I will say that generally, non-print media like Substack, personal blogs and Twitter can be a much higher quality replacement. Requires a little digging though.
I've seen some reporters go from working at a "big" publisher to Substack and I can tell the difference in their writing. Usually more extreme and alarmist. I chalk it up to less review.
Its the difference between a university debate club and an MMA cage. The MMA filter is much stronger, but there tends to be a lot more blood.
Even here, inaccuracies are promoted as fact regularly. I don't count on the social media herd as a compass.
Other than this site I avoid news that comes with a comment section because internet anons have their own biases and agendas and aren't representative.
You end up with nuance swept aside and extreme unflinching loudmouths getting the most visibility. A lot of this goes hand in hand with quitting social media.
It's not an extraordinary claim tho. Literally, every year old people die because of cold weather and not being able to afford the proper heating. This is basically old news. The cost of living "crisis" means that the price of energy is not becoming a matter for the average working person. This isn't really extraorinary to claim since salaries aren't exactly high and many people struggle to pay their bills by default with the price of food, energy, etc all going up while their salaries aren't going up then it clearly means some people will struggle to pay for the heating.
Article shows some modelling, but I was not convinced and can point some holes: https://www.economist.com/interactive/graphic-detail/2022/11...
Yes, but the problem is not explaining that people aren't dying because of the cold itself. The way you wrote this and the way the media portrays the problem makes it sound like people will die from freezing to death, which is just not true.
Pretty much all reporting forgets to add the nuance that deaths in colder months increase because:
1. If it is colder, people are more likely to stay indoors and that increases viral infections
2. Cold makes our immune systems not work as well, which increases the chances of serious complications from infections
3. Cold environments keep viruses around for longer.
4. Cold weather also causes blood to thicken, which can lead to an increased chance of things like strokes (which then lead to higher death rates).
This is the nuance that reporting feels to present.
This is true. Old people freeze to death every year.
It's 100% true in my part of the US.
I haven't seen the article, but it's not a _completely_ outlandish idea; consumer energy prices are up a lot, and in countries where governments haven't taken step to subsidise and/or control energy costs, particularly for elderly people, you would expect deaths.
Now, in practice most countries _have_ taken such steps; if that was left out of the article that would certainly be a concern.
This complaint is one that (jokingly) makes me ask if you're new around here. the Economist is almost pathologically pessimist. I sometimes think they should call themselves _The Cassandra_, as they are constantly forecasting doom over every scenario.
I enjoy how they summarize background information and the candor of their analysis, but when it gets time to make long-term predictions I tune them out because they're about 0-50 on the number of times I should have been walking knee deep through rivers of bodies and economic collapse.
There are good reasons out there to fear or be angry about but I just had to stop with The Atlantic.
They do still have some great posts. I just avoid reading their homepage and only go there if linked to a post.
If nothing else, the pain they put me through to end the subscription was enough to prevent me from ever signing up again.
I'm paying everyone via paypal and just cancel the paypal subscription without ever bothering replying to any email. That works wonders :-)
And wasn't there a law (in EU) that signing up should be as easy and cancelling, if anyone remembers. Most of them allow signup via website but ask you to call to cancel (even after cancelling online, SZ).
I say this as a previous subscriber to FAZ, SZ, and the Economist.
My county’s libraries use Libby, and I get to read The Economist and many other magazine ‘for free’ (reality is my council and other taxes pay for it but you get my drift)
Probably something that is not in English language, since those usually have huge US or UK focus. (Even news like politico.eu are mostly about UK).
I share your sentiment re Economist.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/