On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> Right. Picking up from the other thread: what would an anti-Economist
> even look like?
I've always described Doug's Left Business Observer as "the left antidote to the Economist" and stylistically and intellectually I still think it is. It has all the stylistic virtues people say they love the Economist for: very concise and well written; very wry and sarcastic; brilliant charts; sharply opinionated; and steeped in data. Doug IMHO excels the Economist in all those virtues -- he's more concise, better written, funnier and has better charts. And of course not least, his judgments are truer because his basic principles are better. Stylistically, the only boon the Economist has that LBO is missing is their photo captions.
Now if you want a more left substitute for the Economist as universal news magazine, frankly I think your huckleberry is the Financial Times. It's got more news than the Economist, it's more left, and it's better written. Read it every day for one week (just the first section) and you'll never go back.
The Economist's "Week in Review" section used to be a pleasure I looked forward to every week. And I remember clearly how it felt to open it up the first week after I'd read the FT every day: empty and pointless. It was liking reading the NYT Week in Review section if you've been reading the paper during the week. There was no news there. And even the jokes seemed old and tired. Very shocking. That was the end of my long association with the Economist.
If you want to try this experiment yourself, go to the FT website and get a free 4 week subscription. It can't hurt.
The only downside is the FT is even more time consuming and even more expensive than reading the Economist. But if you want to trade up, that's the way to go IMHO.
Michael