Founded in 1843, the British newsmagazine The Economist has long been an outlier in the news business. Its writers have always been unnamed, a sharp contrast in an industry where reporters not only are identified but increasingly star in vertical videos and hawk their stories on social media.
Now even The Economist is putting its writers and editors in front of the camera.
This summer, it will begin to roll out Economist Play, a new component of its mobile app that will feature shows hosted by Economist correspondents from their studios in New York and London, interviews with newsmakers and policy debates from The Economist’s staff.
“It’s a million miles from Fox News or MSNBC,” Zanny Minton Beddoes, the publication’s editor in chief, said of the videos, some of which debuted in a product called Insider. “It’s a curious and interesting conversation between the people who are experts.”
The supremacy of digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok has prompted news organizations like CNN, ESPN and The New York Times to ramp up production of vertical video for consumers who are increasingly glued to their phones. They’re competing for attention with independent creators, some of them refugees or graduates from traditional news organizations.
The idea isn’t entirely new. The media industry is littered with ill-fated “pivots to video” by publications that reoriented their business models around videos designed to go viral on social media. Those plans have mostly fallen out of vogue, though, and now news organizations are investing in video to deepen reader interest in their core businesses.
The Economist’s plan is more along those lines. It is keeping its weekly magazine, which has roughly 1.3 million subscribers, and offering Economist Play in its app as a separate product, for about $15 per month. Luke Bradley-Jones, the president of The Economist, said in an interview that the magazine’s video efforts were designed to emphasize the “artisanal, human-crafted” aspects of journalism made without artificial intelligence.
“We’ve always had no bylines,” Mr. Bradley-Jones said. “So there’s been a bit of a kind of a veneer between the customer and the journalist at The Economist. And what Insider does is really lift that veil and let the customers see the debates and the discussions that go on inside The Economist that inform the pieces we write.”
Known for serious-minded policy journalism, The Economist has lately been letting its hair down with video interviews between Ms. Minton Beddoes and well-known figures such as Stephen K. Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The goal, Ms. Minton Beddoes said, is to bring The Economist’s thoughtful sensibility to video interviews, which are often reduced to sound bites on social media.
An institution that has published across three centuries, The Economist is in a moment of transition. The magazine’s largest shareholder, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, sold her family’s 26.9 percent stake this year to Stephen Smith, a Canadian billionaire, for an undisclosed sum.
In addition to deepening The Economist’s commitment to video, Ms. Minton Beddoes is planning to eventually hand off the magazine to a successor, after more than a decade at the helm. But some things at the magazine won’t change.
“The world is completely different, but what’s core about it is the same,” Ms. Minton Beddoes said. “It’s rigorous, it’s smart, it’s trustworthy. You can rely on it.”
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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