[LINK] "The Economist wants to give you a sense of completeness, even if that’s an illusion"

[rfmcdonald]

Mathew Ingram writes about the Economist's particular sleight of hand.

There’s a great interview over at the Nieman Journalism Lab with Tom Standage, deputy editor for digital at The Economist, in which he talks about the value proposition that the magazine — whether in print or online — tries to keep in mind when it comes to serving its readers. And it boils down to a single thing: namely, that the Economist wants its audience to feel like they have learned whatever they need to know about a topic by reading its coverage, regardless of what format it appears in.

“We sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. You can never finish the Internet, you can never finish Twitter, and you can never really finish The New York Times, to be honest. So at its heart is that we have this very high density of information, and the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time, then we’ll tell you what matters in the world.”

Ultimately, what the Economist is selling is an illusion — the illusion that you only need to read one thing in order to learn everything about a topic or an event. But that illusion can be very powerful, and very appealing. I remember a friend of mine saying some time ago that one of the main selling points of a physical newspaper is that you can finish it, and he’s right. There’s something very satisfying about getting to the end of a newspaper or a book and thinking “Okay, I’m done now.”

Where I disagree with Standage in his approach is when he describes why the Economist doesn’t link out to either other media outlets or even external websites in its digital offerings, like the daily update called Espresso. In effect, the reason for not doing that is an extension of the argument he makes about convincing people they only need to read one thing. Linking to other websites or sources of information would ruin the illusion of completeness, and then readers would be worried that they weren’t being completely informed. So the magazine doesn’t do it.