'BusinessWeek' Wants to Be 'The Economist' (Join the Club)

Uh-oh. It looks like BusinessWeek, when it rebrands itself Bloomberg BusinessWeek under the direction of Bloomberg's chief content officer Norman Pearlstine, will be the latest struggling American publication to attempt to position itself as an imitation of The Economist, an endeavor at least one media critic (Vanity Fair's Matt Pressman) calls "a fool's errand."

According to Mediaweek's Lucia Moses, the new BusinessWeek will print on better paper stock, have more global news coverage, and charge more for subscriptions. Per Moses, "The changes would move BusinessWeek in the direction of The Economist, for which Pearlstine has expressed admiration and which is envied for its high subscription price, robust circulation growth, and strong advertiser appeal."

And that's where he may go wrong.

In April, VF's Pressman cautioned Newsweek's Jon Meecham against drawing too much inspiration from the English publication, writing, "The news weeklies can never be like The Economist, no matter how hard they try." The Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn wrote a column headlined Why The Economist is thriving while Time and Newsweek fade in July, and former deputy editor of Condé Nast Portfolio Jim Impoco followed up with an essay headlined Economist Envy: The Newsweekly Every Editor Wants to Imitate (and can’t) for Dan Abrams' media website, Mediate.

In all those pieces, Meecham's desire to change his magazine into The Economist was put in context with others who tried before. In 2007, Time magazine's editor Rick Stengel was profiled by New York's Joe Hagan, who wrote, "Over a glass of wine at Palio Bar on 51st Street, Stengel asks me to guess what the most profitable news magazine in the world is. The answer, he says, is The Economist. A magazine of news analysis and intelligent opinion with a clean, easy design, The Economist is a model Stengel admires and wants to inform the new Time."

That same year, the New York Observer's Tom Scocca wrote a piece about other American publications' Economist envy: "The owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, has already revamped his own title, talking all the while about his desire to emulate The Economist. But then, so does everyone. When U.S. News redesigned itself two years ago, The Economist was the in-house role model. In September, Women’s Wear Daily reported that New York editor Adam Moss, acting as a consultant, had advised BusinessWeek to try making covers more like The Economist’s."

That was two years ago. If BusinessWeek had taken its cues from The Economist, wouldn't it be in better shape now? On Ad Age's MediaWorks yesterday, Nat Ives quoted Bloomberg President Daniel L. Doctoroff as saying of his company's newest acquisition, "Right now the subscription price is $35 annually. The Economist is $106. We've got to improve the product and make BusinessWeek a must-have."

Fine. Good. But a must-have for whom? The Economist is—and has always been—a niche product. VF's Pressman compares the magazine to "that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks—millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride."

Harnessing that pride—or, more precisely, smugness—may be the real appeal of The Economist to these editors. It's certainly the appeal to many American readers for whom the magazine has been an upscale fetish object since at least 1991 when The Atlantic's James Fallows called the magazine's editorial voice a product of "Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger" in the Washington Post.

For a businessperson with an intellectual bent, The Economist is less a news source than a lifestyle accessory, the magazine to be seen thumbing in the business-class section as the coach fliers file by to their veal pen in the back. The Economist's clever, pop-y covers look especially good fanned out on the Noguchi coffee table in an ambitious executive's office.

To make his case, Fallows calls attention to a certain kind of Economist reader who feels the need to drop the name of the publication constantly, reminding the world of how smart, well-informed, how outside of America's mass culture he or she is and therefore how very destined for great things he or she is. Fallows cites a New York Times Magazine article from August 1991 in which a young executive—Fallows calls him a "boy billionaire"—brags about not having a TV in his house, saying, "I doubt I'd finish The Economist every week if I had a TV sitting there!"

That "boy billionaire" was named Bill Gates.

Even if they fail, it's no wonder BusinessWeek—and U.S. News, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Time, and so many others before them—wants to follow in The Economist's footsteps. (Each has had little success in doing so, with the possible exception of The Atlantic, which is doing very well under newish editor James Bennet.) Economist-style analysis works pretty well online (witness Thomson-Reuters' purchase of Breakingviews.com last month for around $18 million), so maybe the move towards a more global perspective and institutional voice would make BusinessWeek more relevant on the Web, but the risk there is that it could leave the magazine as something of a weekly loss leader.

Bloomberg, unlike some of those others, might be able to achieve the goal both in print and online: As part of its new parent company, BusinessWeek would gain access to the resources—both in terms of money and, with thousands of reporters in 160 countries, the staff—to pull it off. But it would have to sacrifice a larger audience to do that, something that seemed unlikely as recently as October 19, when Women's Wear Daily's Amy Wicks reported that Pearlstine "said it’s too soon to say whether BusinessWeek’s rate base of 900,000 will increase." While it may not be as immutable as the laws of physics, you can't really go mass and niche at the same time.

The contradictions of those two motivations (growth versus a more tailored sort of prestige) might prove difficult to reconcile if Bloomberg BusinessWeek actually does take Adam Moss' advice from two years ago and reconceives itself as an American Economist. Then again, if everyone in the business press goes in the direction of "Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger," it might just open a space for more practical analysis from less highfalutin publications, an approach the average American reader might be inclined to seek in the current climate.