[ghaff]

>OTOH, I’m not sure that journalistically The Economist really does do some difficult task that no one else can do. I mean, the difficult part is investigative journalism is it not?

It's a reasonable point that The Economist isn't really in the business of breaking news. I had never really thought about it but you're right. I'm sure they wouldn't be opposed to doing so but it's not their focus. (Not that deep investigative stories form a large part of any magazine's or newspaper's focus.)

However, the breadth of what The Economist covers and its very solid writing is--in the aggregate--pretty hard to emulate. It's hard in the sense that you need to pay for a lot of experienced journalists and editors who write well. Individual stories and columns aren't hard but the whole weekly package is. You could probably say the same thing about The Wall Street Journal for that matter.

[netcan]

That's just it, that kind of writing is somewhat peripheral to the core of journalism, at least the definition of journalism which is an institution essential to democracy. It's more stylistically similar to an academic writing a public consumption book chronicling events of the last year than it is to reports from a journalist currently embedded with the propaganda arm of ISIS in Syria.

One can be done from your office at the university, perhaps making extensive use of skype and good contacts.

I have no problem with the economist, I read it. I just don't expect that this kind of writing will be in danger, regardless of the business environment.

[ghaff]

I agree up to a point. There is a lot of value in curating expertise and bringing it together in one quality place.

That said, for kicks I looked through The Economist's media directory and it is indeed pretty London-centric. While I have no doubt that its correspondents are quite knowledgable about their beats (and I assume have plenty of good contacts), it's not like The Economist has a lot of big foreign bureaus.

[mike_hearn]

They did try it once. They had some original investigative journalism of some horrendously convoluted oil deals, or something. I forget the details. It was rather boring.