But it is pie-in-the-sky, because the real difference between E and all the rest is that they have advertising revenues from business to fund them. By definition, no lefty journal will ever have those.
Another possible model for stepping off from could be Counterpunch, which attracts plenty of respectable writers, and only lacks the cover-everything mission of E. I'm not one of them, but believers in the internet have long said that the internet would eventually replace print altogether.
BobW --- Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right. Picking up from the other thread: what would
> an anti-Economist even
> look like?
>
> Well, it would have to be the E but not, right? That
> is, it would have to be
> global in perspective, synthetic in its approach to
> news, rigorous in
> analysis, ruthless in application of principles, and
> critically reflective
> wrt those principles. As the organ of the
> anti-Empire, how can it gain wide
> readership? Does it need wide readership? Probably
> it does, first because
> that's part of the fight, and second, because it
> needs to make that much
> money in order to keep going.
>
> I think the Economist is having success in the US in
> large part because it,
> well, does news. It's not a political magazine, not
> a "newsweekly" in the US
> mold of Time or Newsweek or any of now a half-dozen
> major newspaper weekly
> magazines, and doesn't succumb to the need to do
> stories about Britney
> Spears. Why does no one on this list argue that Time
> or Newsweek are good
> alternatives? Partly because they're crap, but I
> imagine it's also partly
> because the US newsweeklies do different things.
> There are no long or
> investigative pieces in the E. It's essentially a
> big newspaper published
> weekly. You can cruise the week's summaries and the
> TOC in the E every week
> and have a sense that you know basically wtf is
> going on around the world.
> Then you may not read cover to cover, but you can go
> read a succinct and
> generally pretty well written piece on page x. If
> the E were your only
> source, then this would be a problem, but it
> shouldn't be and I'm willing to
> guess it pretty much never is. The same would go, I
> would think, for the
> Anti-E.
>
> So all of this makes me think our comparison with
> the Guardian Weekly and Le
> Monde Diplomatique makes pretty good sense, if we
> could just give them
> bigger budgets. The International Herald-Tribune is
> another model of
> newspaper collaboration going international, and it
> might be useful, here,
> except that we want a weekly. Maybe we could add the
> WSJ and, say, Mother
> Jones to the pool? With some material taken from the
> AFP wire? Throw in some
> independent journalists willing to pitch in for
> modest but reasonable fees
> (or even for free???), and you've got a pool of
> stories--if the relevant
> ownership is willing to share their material for the
> project--that an
> independent editorial board could draw on. Surely
> the best answer would be
> for such a publication to have its own staff of
> well-paid writers, but let's
> suppose for the moment that the scenario I'm working
> on is meaningfully more
> plausible than hiring a full staff for a progressive
> weekly to rival the
> Economist.
>
> You would need money for space, a full-time
> editorial staff (maybe half a
> dozen people?) and a part-time editorial board
> (maybe a dozen to two dozen
> people who would have a genuinely meaningful role to
> play), money to pay
> reasonable rates to occasional freelance
> contributors (say 1-2/week?), and
> then money to cover printing and distribution costs.
> Am I forgetting
> anything? That's presuming that (a) publications
> like the ones noted above
> agree to pitch in not only with reprinted material
> but also (at least
> ideally) with a writer here and there for original
> material, (b) that the
> editorial board is able to spend significant time
> reviewing material for
> inclusion and occasionally writing original
> editorial or other pieces that
> add value to our weekly beyond reprinting material
> available elsewhere. And
> we should keep in mind that we want to break into
> the E's market, but we
> also want to grab markets not on the E's radar, so
> it ought to be cheap, or
> maybe there would be a program for distributing
> copies at low or no cost in
> certain areas or through certain channels.
>
> If this is pie in the sky, which at best it probably
> is (at worst, it is
> precisely the opposite of what leftists and
> progressives ought to be
> worrying about, but that would be a very different
> post), then any dream of
> an anti-Economist is pie in the sky, too.
>
> Anyone got the cash?
>
> j
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