One thing that the Economist has always had going for it its that its scope is far wider than that of other newsweeklies. As someone else pointed out a few days ago, its main focus is often the British Commonwealth (plus America and Europe), but even that is a much wider purview than any of its main American competitors. Its main problem is twofold: its biases mean that for leftists, reading it means reading through necessary lenses, and its biases mean that its target audience is the sort the values that sort of bias. To put it Yale Political Union terms, the Tory Party regulars love the E.
As for Business Week, its main editorial biases are different from those of the WSJ editorial page or the Economist--they are more in line with those of the WSJ news pages. That is not a leftist bias, indeed merely a predisposition to find fault with the excesses of capitalism, but one that requires less filtering from a leftist reader. Its purview is much narrower than that of the Economist, and it has much more of a personal-services bent. Why BW needs a wine column more than it needed a beat reporter on labor issues is beyond me.
BW's biggest problem may be that it values celebrity too much (this is the mirror image of another problem of the E, its anonymity)--how else could Jack and Suzy Welch write utter drivel in its back pages? (A few years ago, BW had an article essentially questioning whether Neutron Jack was really the success that the business press claimed; nothing like that has been printed since he started drawing a check.) And while the filler in back is less offensive than that, it could be used to better purposes.
On the other hand, BW gave Max Sawicky a guest column gig a few months ago, so it's not a complete loss.
--tim francis-wright