The Economist in stereo
By Ross Taylor Posted Oct 1 2007
“It’s lonely at the top,” boasted a classic Economist poster in the late 1980s, “but at least there’s something to read.” Twenty years later, there’s something to hear, too.
The entire magazine has been made available as an audio edition. Since July, subscribers have been able to download seven hours of The Economist’s precise, carefully enunciated prose in one whopping 130-megabyte package.
The move is unprecedented. While the UK’s Talking Newspaper Association has made a few weeklies available to blind people for decades — the Economist, the New Scientist and the Investors Chronicle among them — this is the first time that a major publication has simply broadcast the text of its articles verbatim on the Web without any attempt to edit them for audio consumption.
Until now, papers and magazines have tended to use podcasts as a way of adding value to their print brands and introducing a younger readership to their products. The Economist, whose readership has doubled in the past decade, has taken a far more straightforward approach. But then, the 164-year-old publication has never quite succumbed to the whims of fashion: Despite all appearances, it still calls itself a newspaper.
“I think it’s a confident move that suggests our words can live in a different medium,” says Benjamin Franklin, editor of The Economist’s Web site economist.com. He says the audio edition was inspired by the availability of cheap broadband and the ubiquity of iPods and other MP3 players. Even in 2003, more than a quarter of The Economist’s readers owned some kind of MP3 player, according to the last reader survey. That proportion will undoubtedly have risen since. Furthermore, such a large download simply wouldn’t be feasible without fast Internet connections.
“I suppose it was really a hunch that this might be something that would appeal to our readers,” Franklin says. “It might slot into busy lifestyles and give people the freedom to consume The Economist in different ways.”
The venture is not The Economist’s first foray into audio. The magazine has podcasted occasional interviews with authors and discussions hosted by section editors. A couple of eight-minute podcasts released on iTunes, one looking at the week ahead and the other touting highlights from the current issue, sometimes attract as many as 100,000 downloads. But the new edition is the first time The Economist has charged listeners to download audio. Subscribers to the magazine pay nothing. Others pay $8 or $10 for a back issue, each audio issue lasting six to seven hours. That’s more than the cover price of the magazine ($5.99) but still small beer to The Economist’s affluent readership, whose average income exceeds $154,000. And the audio edition carries no advertisements.
Every line of the magazine, from the headline to the obituary, is read by a team of actors working for a company called Talking Issues. The actors and broadcasters, male and female, were hand-picked by the magazine to ensure they could convey the authority and gravitas associated with The Economist brand as well as its dry wit.
“If we’d done it ourselves,” Franklin says, “it would have been impossible, quite simply impossible. We’ve obviously taken quite some trouble to get the quality right and get the right mix of voices.”
The magazine’s famous no-byline policy made the task easier. Most magazines rely on a stable of well-known contributors and columnists, and readers would have expected to hear them reading out their own stories. The Economist faced no such obstacle, which eased the fact that its correspondents are based all over the world and could never file a studio-quality recording.
“There was never any question we would have our own people,” Franklin says. “It just wouldn’t have been feasible. We get this out by 5 p.m. on a Friday. In many parts of the world, you can’t get the magazine as quickly as that.”
The initial reaction from readers has been “extraordinarily enthusiastic,” Franklin says. “We asked people to take a survey once they’d downloaded it to tell us what they think, and we’ve had remarkably positive feedback.”
Business people are apparently listening to The Economist in the “dead time” during their daily commute or on the treadmill at the gym. Older readers prefer to listen as they putter around the house, particularly if their eyesight is beginning to fail.
“We rolled it out as a soft launch with a subset of our subscriber to see what load it would place on our servers,” Franklin says. Downloads have “consistently been much higher than we were expecting. So we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the numbers.”
Brian J. East, a former strategic intelligence analyst from Ontario and a longtime subscriber to The Economist’s print edition, is one of the converted. He finds the audio version much easier to carry around than the magazine. “It is essentially a verbal briefing, which can easily be loaded onto a minute MP3 player and permits me to multitask.”
If seven hours of audio sounds like a lot, Franklin points out that articles and sections can be skipped just like music tracks. Some listeners won’t even bother downloading one or two of the regional sections. Others will skip finance. In any case, Economist subscribers are used to setting aside time for their favorite publication, and they read the print edition with unusual thoroughness. Thirty-five percent of them devote two to three hours to it, and 17 percent spend more than three hours poring over the magazine. The average magazine gets just 45 minutes.
What the listeners miss is The Economist’s famously witty photo captions, the graphs and charts, KAL’s cult cartoon (available on Economist.com in the “Kallery”) and the pages of top jobs. East says he would like an audio-visual release — “not a newscast,” he explains, “but supporting graphics to the story.”
Not everyone is won over by the BBC diction. “How on earth did they manage to make The Economist so dull?” asks Jemima Kiss, the Guardian’s new media reporter and the former editor of journalism.co.uk. “There’s something desperately unimaginative about employing a few people to read your entire magazine cover to cover.”
Kiss continues: “How many factual radio shows involve one-person monologues? It’s hard to listen to and hard to engage with. And anyone who has spent five minutes in broadcasting — and make no mistake, this is broadcasting — will tell you that writing for print and writing for broadcast are a long way apart.”
The magazine should bring together some of its writers to discuss the week’s events, she says. “There’s a real opportunity here to do something new, something more conversational.” That may well happen in the coming months: economist.com has just hired its first multimedia editor.
But is the venerable weekly already on to something? Will other newsweeklies follow its lead in recording their entire contents? It looks unlikely. Several have dabbled in podcasting, but without much success. The British political weeklies the Spectator and the New Statesman have experimented with a Christmas story and recorded somewhat turgid panel debates (“Will MPs use their communications allowance effectively?”), but the New Scientist has dropped its weekly podcast, which ran original interviews and features.
“When push comes to shove, it wasn’t making us any money,” says the editor of the New Scientist, Jeremy Webb, who has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. “We couldn’t get any sponsorship for it.” The number of downloads was in five figures a week, but the podcast was using up resources that he believes are better spent on video.
Webb doubts New Scientist readers want to have the magazine read out loud to them. “I can only assume Economist readers must have a lot of time in cars.”
He doesn’t rule out a return of the podcast if a sponsor comes along —“a lot of people here missed it very much” — but says video gives a much greater return than audio. In recent months, the American weeklies Time and Newsweek and France’s L’Express and Le Nouvel Observateur have also ploughed their resources into video rather than podcasting with mixed results.
The New Yorker, a magazine that attracts a readership that, although less international, is almost as devoted as The Economist’s, has taken a more creative approach. Like The Economist, it produces a weekly iTunes teaser intended to boost sales of the magazine. But it also runs spin-off discussions about stories that have already appeared. In August, visitors to newyorker.com were treated to a reading of an Isaac Babel short story by the writer George Saunders, followed by a chat with The New Yorker’s fiction editor.
The Economist may take a similar approach. After all, one of its most famous editors, Walter Bagehot, spoke of the need “to be conversational, to put things in the most direct and picturesque manner, as people would talk to each other in common speech, to remember and use expressive colloquialisms.”
It would be a pity if the magazine failed to apply those values to its audio broadcasts, especially since its readers can hardly get enough.