The Economist on 'Finishability'

People behind The Economist magazine talked to book author David Sax in 2015:

...A great case against free is made by The Economist, a magazine I have subscribed to for a decade. Prior to my London visit, I read that The Economist had grown its print circulation from 1 million weekly copies in 2006 to more than 1.6 million in 2015, at a time when many print publications have seen their circulations decline. The Economist did this while charging handsomely for both the magazine and online subscriptions, which average around $150 a year, and cost the same digitally as in print. "Our business model assumed print advertising will go away," Tom Standage, The Economist's deputy editor, said over a rushed sushi lunch. But if you give away content because you want to get ad money, when the ad money goes away, you won't be able to afford your content. We're not interested in reach. What we want is the profit!" The Economist was completely agnostic about print or digital, so long as readers paid for it.

Standage felt the paper edition of The Economist had actually grown because of something he called "finishability": the ability of readers to actually finish an issue. A magazine has a defined beginning, middle, and end, and reaching that end is incredibly satisfying. "We sell the feeling of being smarter when you get to the end," Standage said. "It's the catharsis of finishing." A news website, by contrast, can never be finished. It is a constant stream of stories, updates, and special features whose very attraction is its endless content. What Standage found interesting was that the growth of The Economist's digital subscriptions has mostly been to an older audience while younger readers, like me, prefer the magazine in print. "We assume younger people want The Economist as a social signifier," Standage said. "You can't show others you're reading it with the digital edition. You can't leave your iPad lying around to show others how smart you are."

Standage's reference to the iPad was telling, because that device is indicative of the gap between digital publishing's great promise and reality. At first, ...

How would the social signifier feature of paper be achieved digitally? Surely there's a way.

Additionally, reading the paper edition increases a peer pressure effect within the subway car. People feel good holding up a book on a crowded subway. Some feel shame or vacancy playing a game. "That was a dark period," podcaster Elizabeth Craft said of her addiction to one "soul-destroying" game on an episode of Happier. Exposing which periodicals commuters are reading on their phone within the same car could encourage others away from soul-destroying apps and towards the "catharsis of finishing" an article.

One elder who encouraged my cousins and me to always read a newspaper at the breakfast table confessed to peer-pressure she and her allies imposed with full intention on her sorority sisters. "We used to get the newspaper then sit next to people who ate breakfast staring into space" she said, smiling at the recollection of her own superiority!

(Following that last anecdote, of course, we can envision the backlash brewing in response to perceived peer pressure to read. Some people will resent the smarty-pants in the crowd, and defiantly engage with soul-destroying apps. An app to harness the backlash will be written by another party at another time.)





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.