The Economist is still thriving

I was greatly relieved to learn from Michael Hirschorn’s piece in The Atlantic that The Economist, my preferred news source and one of my favorite publications in general, is not going to go under any time soon and is in fact prospering while the rest of the ‘old media’ crumble. The reasons Hirschorn gives for this are not surprising: The Economist has managed to monopolize a niche market with a combination of Olympic editorial standards, a cosmopolitan and intelligent eye, forthright opining and not least a sly marketing strategy with which the Economist brand has acquired an unsurpassed cachet of intelligence and worldliness, whether or not it deserves it. Hirshorn’s criticism of the newspaper is also spot on:

At its worst, the writing can be shoddy, thin research supporting smug hypotheses. The “leaders,” or main articles, tend to “urge” politicians to solve complex problems, as if the key to, say, reconstituting the global banking system were but a simple act of cogitation away.

Too true, although the tendency towards overconfident consul (and frequently sloppy science reporting) are only small blots on their otherwise exemplary record.

Reading Hirschorn’s piece, I began to wonder what it is about the “global news digest” model that I find so appealing. I gave up reading the local Australian boradsheets a long time ago, but have never quite been able to articulate what it is I disliked about them, only that it consistantly felt like I was being told things I neither wanted nor needed to know.

Skimming through the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, I am struck by not only the quality but the irellevance of so much of the content. A fair proportion of local or national news reporting is made up of “minor but exciting event” stories: factory fires, natural disasters, competition winners, murders, and so forth. It is not obvious why these things are reported in a general medium such as a newspaper. A factory fire has very little effect on anybody except people who have a direct connection to the factory in question, and they would presumably know already – so why report it in a national newspaper?

There are two explanations usually given for this kind of reporting. The first is the ‘news as entertainment’ model – we like these stories for their shock or titillation value, and the fact that they actually happened has relevance only as a thin excuse for their publication, or as an extra kick of excitement – “based on a true story!” The second is that such reports make readers aware of events which are common or becoming more common and hence may one day affect them, although of course they have the opposite effect: such stories only bias our perception of the actual probability of such events. If we genuinely wanted to be able to correctly anticipate the probability we will be murdered, for example, we would demand that newspapers never publish stories of gruesome murders, lest they influence our perception of the real risk, and instead report regularly on the crime rate in the driest possible terms. We would read specialist journals or trade magazines reporting on events that do have direct relevance for us – perhaps forensics experts would pick up the latest copy of Gruesome Murders Weekly – but by and large the big broadsheets would only contain a digest of recent legislation and statistical trends.

It would be a presumptuous mistake to think that The Economist serves this role. We readers may be smug with the sense that we are rising above such trivia by reading a pure digest of truly important global events, but The Economist is no such thing. Last week I read a detailed account of the issues surrounding logging and property rights in the Brazilian Amazon. How is this any more relevant to me than the latest factory fire? At least the factory fire story has entertainment value. Why is it that I feel the topics on which The Economist reports are so much more interesting and important? More importantly, why do so many people feel the same way that the newspaper is thriving in spite of market conditions?

It is entirely possible that the whole thing comes down to pure status signaling. Cosmopolitanism and knowledge about world affairs are, at least in Western society, very strong signals of high intelligence and status. If I can be permitted to indulge in some armchair psychology, this is because “knowledge of world affairs” is a powerful synergy of two other status symbols. In-depth knowledge about a narrow subject can signal intelligence, but it also can carry negative connotations – nobody wants to be the nerd. However, when this knowledge is in the domain of world affairs, you are simultaneously signaling a connection to the domain of global leadership, of important people doing important things, which (especially for males) is a very strong signal of high social status and neatly counters the downside of heavy domain-specific knowledge. In this model, The Economist serves simultaneously as a token of this high-status signal and a source of information and conversational topics with which to repeatedly send it. Its forthright editorializing thus serves a dual role, as a signal to the reader of the newspaper’s self-confidence and as a steady source of informed opinions for the reader to adopt.

Yet this does not seem an entirely satisfying explanation. I frequently disagree with The Economist’s editorial positions, and this does not diminish my appreciation of the newspaper – if anything, it assures me that I am able to process even their reporting with a critical eye. I appreciate The Economist’s unabashed position-taking all the more because I do not feel I am being pandered to as a reader. When it comes to status signalling, readers may have as much to gain as they do to lose: I have met more people who seem to use disdain for The Economist’s cachet as a countersignal for their own anti-elitism than I have those who profess to read it themselves. Whatever the secret to The Economist’s success, I hope they keep it.

Review: John Brunner’s “The Squares of the City”

I love novels about cities that manage to compellingly capture both the social mileau and the individual people who comprise it.

There are unfortunately too few of these. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, one of my favorite books, is the best example of this narrow genre. The Unconsoled is usually noted for its experimental style, a blend of magical realism in the image of Salman Rushdie’s with Ishiguro’s own elegant prose. Maybe it is no coincidence that John Brunner’s The Squares of the City, a not unlaudable “city novel”, is also an experiment, which succeeds more than it fails.

Brunner’s gimmick is that the novel is a fictionalization of a real-life chess game, with the pieces represented by characters, and all the moves corresponding to a progression in the plot. It is too easy to see how this would hamstring an author, and indeed Squares fails in exactly the ways you would expect. The plot, which for the first two thirds of the book manages to work these moves into a compelling political intrigue, falls apart completely in the final act when the author is forced to play out the endgame: characters threaten each other, maneuver and die in a sudden and impossible to follow storm of activity which is weakly tied into the overall arc. The denouement is both surreal and unsatisfying.

Despite this, Squares is a good read. Although the stage suffers from a crowd of minor players, the central characters are charming and surprisingly real. Brunner coyly eschews cliche: the protagonist is an introspective and intellectual traffic engineer, hardly a heroic archetype; his main foil, a stunning Latina widow, never quite becomes a love interest. Although the author explicitly groups the characters into “black” and “white” teams, the political struggle which forms the novel’s centerpiece is textured and morally ambiguous. Wisely, Brunner never tells us how it is resolved. Stylistically, Squares is also a success. The use of chess as both a central metaphor and recurring motif is deftly handled, and the apparently pragmatic prose frequently conceals sophisticated description and observation. Brunner’s occasional detours into the hard details of traffic engineering or government propagandizing are charming rather than jarring.

Above all, Squares succeeds as a city novel. Like the unnamed Central European city in The Unconsoled, Brunner’s Ciudad de Vardos, a recently constructed ‘ideal’ city in a fictional South American nation, is a major character and palpable presence in the book. Vardos’s squares, streets, offices, villas, plazas and slums are vividly imagined and are as one in the reader’s mind with its citizens, bureaucrats, artists, villains and heros. This is not least because, by a clever plot device, many of the residents had a direct hand in the city’s design and construction. The slow but inevitable embroilment of the protagonist, an outsider, into Vardos politics and society is matched by the reader’s. Unfortunately, the collapse of the plot in the final act disrupts this deep and satisfying involvement.

Read Squares if, like me, you love a good city novel and want something thoughtful and vivid. Don’t read it if you are deterred by overt experimentation, or think you are picking up a political thriller.

Image: “chess in the park“, by Duchamp. Shared under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.