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That is B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com/enterprise. Thanks a lot, Beehiiv. Okay, welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This week, my guest was The Economist president, Luke Bradley Jones.
You know, one of the core challenges facing legacy media brands is how to compete in a decentralized media environment that rewards individual voices over a collective institutional voice.
And that was the way to go in the analog era.
Just think of the retreat from newspaper political endorsements, and even how editorial boards overall feel like anachronisms and have far less impact in the discourse, as they say, than prominent individuals.
And this is a challenge for a brand like The Economist, mostly because it has been so successful in building a collective voice for the brand around its small L liberal belief in free markets, free trade, and free political systems.
It's, by the way, a set of beliefs that were the default during globalization, but, uh, are now under threat, if not in retreat, in many, if not most parts of the, of the world.
One of the defining aspects of The Economist has long been its lack of bylines.
This signals that the magazine, or, or newspaper, as it likes to call itself, is a manifestation of what Luke calls the hive mind of its editorial team.
You know, The Economist has rollicking debates over its editorials, or leaders, as it calls them, and comes to a rough consensus that hews to an editorial line that, for the most part, has been consistent for the past hundred fifty or so years.
So the question ends up becoming how to modernize this approach while not losing what made the brand distinctive in the first place.
So for The Economist, that means lifting the veil on this hive mind process to uncover how the sausage is made.
It did research, and it found that by keeping its journalists somewhat anonymous, that had led to a little bit of intrigue.
And so they are putting that to use by making its journalists more front and center now, whether that's helming newsletters or podcasts, and particularly through its new twice-weekly streaming show, The Insider, which features The Economist journalists, as well as guests digging into the biggest stories of the week.
An early episode set off a little micro drama.
I don't think we can have full dramas these days, just micro dramas, with Steve Bannon when he told The Economist's somewhat incredulous editor that she needs to accept the fact that Donald Trump will again run for president, even though he is not eligible to run for president.
So
Luke and I get into all of this and, you know, how The Economist finds inspiration from Ferrari in trying to be a luxury brand and why human-crafted journalism is actually well-positioned in an AI-mediated media environment.
Hope you enjoy this episode. As always, send me a note with feedback. My email is brian@therebooting.com. And if you like the show, please leave it a rating or review. Now here's my conversation with Luke.
[upbeat music] Luke, thank you for, thank you for powering your way through The Economist security system. It was worth it, Brian, to be here with you. [chuckles] There you go.
So anyway, this is something new we're trying called TRB Live, and it's, it's a way, you know, to build off of, you know, both the online forums we've done that have been successful, but also the podcast.
And I wanted to-- Luke and I have been talking about doing a podcast, and I was like, "You know, we're gonna be touching on The Economist streaming show, and so let's, let's do this live."
And so we had a little, we had a few, you know, snafus, but that's okay. So we're gonna talk a lot about... The Economist is, is one of my favorite brands. I gotta say that, Luke. Thanks.
I have actually one time, even before I was in this profession, I visited where The Economist's, St. James's Place, I think it was, or maybe called St. James or something. I have no idea. Yep.
But I went there- It's a street... it was like a pilgrimage as, like, a student because I was so into The Economist. I was a bit of a weirdo. But, like, I think,
when I think about, like, what, what brands are, like, well-positioned right now, I think The Economist has a lot of the ingredients for a successful brand, you know? And that is that it's incredibly strong brand.
It's got a very deep connection with its audience, with a big subscription business. And it also is focused on a very lucrative area, which i- is, you know, the sort of global elite, if you will.
And I, I think that there are, you know, a lot of different ways that you can make money with, with a brand like this, and it's a very differentiated brand.So I wanna get into to that with you and how you take this great base, obviously, that The Economist has and modernize it, 'cause every brand needs to, to modernize it.
So thanks for, for, for joining us, Luke. Thanks for having me, Brian, and I'm glad to count you among our global elite, and [laughs] I'm not a global elite.
But, you know, any of those elite brands, you know, there, there's always the people who are, like, pushing their, their nose up against the glass that are the bigger numbers than the actual elites.
So, you know, that's just how the racket works. Anyway, so let's get, let's, let's get into it.
Like, I, I was doing, like, a little, like, SWOT analysis of The Economist before this, and, you know, I went through some of the strengths. And I think one of the interesting...
'Cause I always think one of our strengths are usually, you know, ends up being challenges, right? And I think of The Economist as having an incredibly strong institutional voice, right? But- Right...
we seem to be in this age of, like, individuals, right? And how I think every brand has to figure where they play along that spectrum. So let's just start by, like, how do you end up thinking about that?
Yeah, so it's, it's an interesting s- sort of circle to try and square, right?
Because historically we have been renowned for having no bylines in our printed product, whether that's the, the weekly print edition or the, or what we publish online.
So we've had what we'd like to call a hive mind of The Economist's journalistic newsroom producing this very, very well thought through, very clearly reasoned, fact-based, independent point of view, and that is The Economist's point of view.
It's, it's our collective viewpoint on the world and the stories that matter, shaping the, the, you know, today and tomorrow around the world, and that's really been a signature of our journalism.
So then, you know, kind of forward into the 21st century and the advent of digital and then the advent of podcasts and increasing the importance of, of video in, in all forms of journalism, and we realized that we had to find a, a way to sort of strike the right balance between that very kind of deeply, deeply held point of view that, that there's nothing more important than The Economist's point of view.
Also starting to make sure that we bring more, more personality into some of our journalism in those, in those audio and video channels, and actually whether we serve a, like, a growing audience desire to, to really get closer to our journalists, and that probably is shaped by some of those broader trends that you talk about, the importance of personality and the importance of individual voices.
And I don't think we're ever gonna go right down that route.
But what we are gonna do is w- w- we're lifting the veil, and we have lifted the veil already on our journalists, on our newsroom, and that started with podcasts over the last two or three years where we have- Yeah...
five weekly podcasts hosted by the same people. Those people have followings. So we're not in the business of kind of keeping our co- our journalists completely anonymous. You know, they're listed on our website.
We're very proud of who they are, and a number of them have got real followings in social. So they don't have to sign a kind of a, an oath of secrecy when they, when they join The Economist.
[laughs] And podcasts have been a good way of just sort of breaking people into that more public realm. Yeah.
But the, the, the thing which is really taking it up a notch is the, the, the new premium video product that we just launched three, three and a half weeks ago called The Economist Insider. Yeah.
And that for the first time is actually really fully...
Instead of having kind of produced podcast shows on topics which have been pre- predetermined, that is lifting the veil on the discussions, the debates that go into those hive minds, you know, written articles that appear in the weekly edition.
And so we have a weekly show every Thursday hosted by our editor in chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, and our deputy editor, Ed Carr. They are the, they are the two co-hosts of the show every single Thursday.
And then we have a second show every Tuesday which deep dives into a range of topics from geopolitics to defense to economics and, and technology.
And they're all hosted by the same people if, you know, for each of the shows as they come around.
So we're gonna start making, if not superstars out of these people, then certainly they're gonna become known as the hosts of these shows, and the shows are gonna be watched by, already are being watched by a, a really decent number of people every week.
And, and that, that I think is where we're gonna try and strike this balance where the, the core written product, which is the majority of our output, remains no bylines, remains the, the collective viewpoint of The Economist brand.
Yes.
But every week we're gonna lift the veil with The Economist Insider on a Tuesday and on a Thursday, and you're gonna see inside, you know, sort of behind the, behind the curtain, as it were, and see how the magic is made and really get closer to the senior editors that are, that are shaping the stories that we, we print every week in our, in our- Yeah, and I guess that will also, like, provide a look into the sort of debates that go into coming up with an institutional point of view.
Because I think about, you know, like a lot of times in America, we go back to, like, the editorial page endorsements of, like, political candidates, right? Right.
And the idea that there's, like, an editorial board is a little anachronistic in these, in this day and age. You know, I know, like, The Washington Post, you know, famously sort of pulled its endorsement of Kamala.
I'm not sure if people vote based on, like, who the newspaper editorial board says to vote for, but, like, there's this idea that it's just this one, like, voice from above, right?
And obviously with the rise of podcasters, there's a lot more trust in individuals. But talk to me about the, the strategic context of what...
Like, what is the job that, that the streaming show, The Insider, is going to do? I mean, you're... Like The, The Economist is part of The Economist Group, right?
Its, uh, subscriptions are, you know, the lion's share of the business. You have, I think, uh, about 1.25 million subscribers. Digital is obviously growing very quickly. 85%, I believe, of new subs are now digital. Yep.
So is this a... So what is the job this is doing? Is this to, is this to mitigate churn? Is this to bring in new subscribers, or is this to diversify with, with sponsorship?
I mean, I know that Claude is, is at least the launch sponsor. Correct. I, I think it's a mixture of, of a number of those things, but first and foremost, it's really delivering on what our-... customers were asking for.
So the first thing I did when I arrived here just over a year ago is commission a big piece of research to understand which elements of our proposition, our service, were customers satisfied with, what did they want more or less of.
And the, and the theme that came out of that incredibly clearly was that, that customers wanted to get closer to our journalists.
They want to understand more of the thinking behind what they were reading every week in the written output. And they wanted to have- Yeah...
more of a chance to ask questions, they wanted to have to be in a conversation, is that proximity.
And actually, at the same time, I went along to my first Monday morning meeting, and I'd been a subscriber to The Economist for however many decades, but had never realized kind of when you get this polished output, this very clear, settled, authoritive point of view on, on a big story, right?
As if it's kind of absolutely- On literally anything, too. I'm like- On whatever, whatever you might want... the confidence of saying what Sri Lanka needs to do [laughs] in its trade policy does it, like, it's amazing.
No doubt. No doubt. And yeah, I went into this Monday morning editorial meeting which happens every, every week, the whole other newsroom gathered in person and, and Zoomed in from around the world.
And the level of discussion, debate, discourse that was happening around each and every lead article being published that week. So the, the author would pitch their idea, that every... This happens every Monday.
They pitch their idea to the newsroom, they get sort of five minutes to talk through, you know, kind of what they're gonna say about, you know, Iran-Israeli relations, whatever it may be.
And then the whole other newsroom gets to opine on that point of view. So hands go up, Zanny's chairing the meeting, and you get this really robust debate.
It's like a kind of, it's like a university tutorial on steroids where you have this just sheer brainpower- Yeah... dissecting whatever's been proposed.
You know, kind of saying what's missing, what's wrong, what they disagree with, what they agree with. And then the, the, the, the author has like a couple of minutes to respond to this like litany of points.
And off the back of that, Zanny chooses the leaders, and those leaders then go and get written and published in that week's weekly, weekly edition.
And that's kind of the linchpin of our output, those leading articles are kind of our point of view on the most important stories or the most interesting stories of that week.
And I sat there and it just blew me away seeing that kind of discourse and debate that, that feeds every single point of view that then gets positioned and published as a very clear, authoritive perspective.
And I kind of thought l- if, if I find that so interesting as, as a longtime subscriber, and I've got this research in my hand saying that's what customers are after, how do we bring that to our customers?
And short of inviting them into the newsroom every Monday, this'd be a little bit, little crammed for space, why don't we create a show where the editors all get together and r- and replay some of that debate?
And that's what we're doing in our weekly show- Yeah... every, every Thursday with Zanny. So right now it's open to everyone, but this is gonna be subsc- I think it is. I'm a subscriber, so like- It's- I, I...
subscribers only. It's open to all our subscribers. Yeah. We've made it available to all our subscribers. Okay. And we're off to a great start.
So kind of three weeks in, we've got about 20% of our base have already watched at least one episode. A really good share of that base have watched two or more episodes.
So we've seen really rapid early adoption of the service. Given it's completely new, we've started from 0% awareness on October the 9th.
Three weeks in, we're, we're up at 20% of the base already using the, using the product. So you're basically betting that this kind of insider approach to video can be a subscription product.
I mean, usually I think people think of video as more of a top of the funnel product. Advertisers love video, et cetera. Right. Like it just plays in- into that. I don't think people are as habituated to...
Or maybe not, maybe... I, I just see video used differently a lot of times. So wh- why, why is this important to...
I would guess it's to keep subscribers happy, finding value, and therefore it, the job it does is churn mitigation. But- Yeah...
you know, I'm sure you think that The Economist has 1.25 odd million people paying them, that there can be several million other people who are paying. And there's 10 million people who are...
There's 10 million plus people who are play- paying The New York Times. Right. I didn't think that that would ever happen. Why wouldn't- Right... there be 5 million people paying The Economist? I would like that.
I'd like that a lot. Yeah. And listen, I hope- Make it happen... inside of play- plays a role in that, right? Because we're going out, we're breaking these shows.
Part of how we're making the shows is we're interviewing interesting people. So in our second week we interviewed Steve Fannon. We wanna make sure we've got a, a wide array of, of personalities- Broke news there too...
there too. Pardon? Broke news. Not, not the best part of n- not, not the best news to break, but broke news.
It certainly got some attention, so it went viral on, on social and, and got a lot of, lot of pickup in a lot of different outlets. And that sort of thing really just, you know, kind of gives oxygen to the brand.
And, and we're not gonna go, we're not gonna, we're not gonna chase clicks, but we are gonna interview people who we think have got a really important point of view.
And, and whether or not you agree with him, half of America agrees with him, so we want- Yeah... to hear what he have to say and, and, and give him a chance to talk about that.
And so that's the sort of the show that we're trying to make where we, we have really robust debates, some f- often just amongst ourselves, but often with guests who might have the same or a different point of view.
You know, the week before we had Mark Carney, where there's probably a lot more alignment with our, with our subscribers in terms of his world outlook, but that's gonna do a great job for helping attract people to the brand as well.
But I think more than anything, Brian, you know, apart from giving customers what they said they wanted, the strategic value of this is that we are really trying to build a moat around what product is in a world of AI, right?
And as, as the kind of the, the volume of AI-generated content continues to grow and people get used to LLMs and AI aggregators over time, and they get their news from that source, how do we create something that's truly differentiated that is leaning into what is unique about The Economist, which to my mind is a human-crafted, artisanal journalism.
It's the sort of the, you know, we see parallels with some of the top fashion brands out there who really think about the quality of what's made and how it's made, and the fact that that is human originated.
And by leaning into that video product, we're putting our human senior editors right front and center of that experience.
And so we also see it as a, as a really valuable, kind of a robust way of, of defending against some of the trends coming out of the AI space right now.Yeah. Talk to me about it being like a premium product, right?
Because, I mean, The Economist costs a lot of money, right? Like, I think your average revenue per subscriber is probably twice what the Times is and thereabouts.
And I think the Times just came out, they're at, like, $10 per month- Yeah... or 120 or so a year. My napkin maths put you guys somewhere around 220 or something of that nature.
But, like, talk to me about, like, how you play on that premium. And because like, like you were saying, like, luxury brands have struggled honestly with digital media because it's harder.
It liter- the, the entire point of the internet i- sort of runs against, like, what, uh, luxury. It's, it's anti-scarcity. It's anti-friction. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, like- Yeah...
you go around Milan, you gotta, like, ring doorbells to get into stores just to buy something. Right. I don't know if you've thought about trying that. Maybe that's something. [laughs] We've, we've thought about it.
We've thought about it. And scarcity is a really, you know, fascinating topic, and, and the best brands have managed that very well. You know, Enzo Ferrari, you know, had this, this famous saying that he wanted- Yeah...
to make one fewer Ferrari than there was demand for in the world, which is a really- Yeah...
neat way of thinking about how you sort of really control- And also by the way, ano- another brand that is, like, literally their, their ecosystem around it are people that do not actually own Ferraris. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. [laughs] They've, they've, they've got a lot of... They've got, they've got a big ecosystem, and, and not that many- Yeah... people buying them, but it works very well for them.
And so we've thought about that, but I kind of, to limit the number of people who could have The Economist feels a little bit counterintuitive when, you know, part of our mandate is to spread the word and play, you know, you know, influence people around the world and their points of view and their, and their decisions.
Mm-hmm. So I... It's, it's an interesting concept, but it's not one that we've decided to run with yet to actually limit the number of subscriptions that we put out in the marketplace. Yeah.
But what we can do is we can, we can create content that is scarce in its nature, and we think, you know, to have access to the editor-in-chief of our, of, of The Economist every week is something which is unprecedented for existing or historic customers.
And if we do that, and we don't make it available anywhere apart from behind our paywall, then that creates something which is really valuable and quite scarce in nature for our existing customers and our future customers.
So do you have, like, a big subscriber goal, paying subscriber goal? Like, I mean, you know, I think, again, I go back to The New York Times. You know, they go out and, and put a big subscriber number out there.
They're, they're aiming- They do... to be 15 million by the end of 2027, and I think that can be, like, galvanizing.
I'm just wondering what the ambitions are because as I said, like, I think you guys can probably, I would guess your research shows that you can play on both sides of the price curve.
There are people, and I think this is the tricky part when you're gonna be, like, a luxury good, is you probably have a lot of people who are paying you 200 odd dollars a year that should be paying you thousands of dollars a year or could be paying you thousands of dollars a year.
Right. But, and you know, I think you guys tried this with Espresso and whatnot, there's a lot of people who would absolutely love to have access to The Economist at a slightly different price point. Yeah.
We've had that debate for sure, and, uh, we've run the numbers on a few different options.
I think where we've netted out is we do wanna keep growing our customer base, but we're in the business of positioning ourselves as a premium brand.
And so rather than going after volume growth at all costs, we wanna make sure that we continue to invest in what The Economist experience is and what The Economist brand stands for, but that we maintain that premium positioning in terms of our offering, in terms of our pricing, in terms of our brand positioning.
So, you know, we don't... We're, we're, we're not in the same game as The New York Times.
New York Times have deliberately discounted very heavily, you know, lowered their, you know, their ups over time, their, their average revenue per user's gone down.
They've really aggressively gone after that volume, and obviously that drives a big advertising machine for them as well. They're a different beast. They're a different brand. They've...
What they're doing, they're doing incredibly well. I have nothing but admiration for how they're executing on their strategy.
But I think we are, we're more of a kind of, as we've talked about, an exclusive and, and premium brand where we're gonna... We're, we're playing more in that sort of scarcity end of the, of the spectrum.
Okay, so no dollar a week offers. You can't be Gap. You can't be always 50% off. And there is a, like... Look, there's, there's a formula with that volume playbook. I think not everyone can, can run it.
I think some brands, it's a little bit of an awkward fit when I see them out there with their 80% off offers. Right.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I'm like, you can't be, you can't be saying you're premium, [laughs] premium out there, and then, like, in the email- It's like going to-...
you're telling me you're 80% off all the time. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't, doesn't sit well. So talk to me a little bit about, like, how you end up...
What does that mean with, like, what you end up not doing, right? Like, so what are opportunities?
'Cause I think there's a, a- as I said, there's a lot of different directions you can take a, a brand like this, and it has, you know, The Economist goes back to, what, 1843.
I think it was, like, we're debating the Corn Laws or something, and it was a little bit of a different era.
And so there's a lot of different things you can do to that, but at the same time, your restriction is you gotta, you gotta, you gotta stay premium. We've got a relatively small newsroom compared to our competitors.
You know, we have just over 300 people in our newsroom, and that's, what, probably 1/10 of what The New York Times have.
So we think, we've thought about whether we expand that and whether we expand our coverage, but actually to maintain the level of quality and rigor that goes into every single word that you read or every single podcast that we publish, and now every single show that we make each week, you can only broaden that bandwidth so far without having some sort of compromise to the consistency- Mm-hmm...
and quality of what you produce. So-We deliberately have not invested into lifestyle. We have not expanded coverage into more generalist news. We haven't gone into sports.
You know, these are areas, A, which are very well served by the market, but B, which would inevitably involve a broadening of our proposition and, and would risk the, the, the, the, the incredible level of rigor and care that goes into every single piece of journalism that we put out each week.
We, we by design have a smaller output, and that allows us to be, you know, kind of incredibly thorough in our fact-checking, which is sort of one of the, one of the hallmarks of our journalism that allows us to have a very, very thorough editing process, which involves the, the senior team every single week.
So they're very hands-on in terms of their involvement and, you know, kind of putting the, putting the weekly edition to bed every, every week on a, on a Wednesday evening is always, you know, a-- it's a crafted process.
It's really is sort of hand-stitched. And so I think- Yeah... in that way, that means that we can't ever try and go broader in our journalistic coverage. Yeah. If there is-- So, so talk to me about the magazine.
I mean, you guys call it a newspaper. We do. I call it a magazine. Fair enough. But I know I'm never gonna win that one. But that's fine. It's still a magazine to me.
But like, you know, look, it's, it's inevitably like, you know, the question ends up being like what is the role of it?
I think of The Economist as like a slightly different-- like, I mean, I-- there, there are print publications that I, I just, I want as print and I consume mostly as print. The Economist is actually one of them.
The FT Weekend is, is another and then, you know, niche magazine type brands. But what do you-- what is it?
Because I mean, that is the calling card and in some way, in some ways it's a little anachronistic, but I, I feel like, you know, with, with The Economist being-- like I don't think of The Economist as like breaking news.
I know the, the- Yeah... the Bannon thing with the third term was, was, was one. There's, there, there have been others. But I look at The Economist actually as being, you know what?
There's a swirl of stuff going through the week. I'm fine waiting till Saturday to figure out what [chuckles] like what all this stuff means.
So what is the end up, you know, when you're thinking about expressing the brands, whether that's in podcasts or in video, and then we can talk about events.
Like how do you end up thinking about the, the magazine/newspaper? Because it is, it is the core of the brand- Yeah... but it's not the only thing the brand does. Yeah. It's a really interesting balancing process, right?
Because around a third of our customers are still very, very attached to their physical edition every week. Yeah. And totally understandably so, right?
And actually in a world of kind of sort of digital overload and especially as the, the world of AI slop comes along, that pleasure of holding something in your hand and being able to sit back and enjoy the weekend as you described- Yeah...
is gonna become more important, not less important. So we don't see the, the magazine as you'd like to call it, going away anytime soon.
And we're gonna, we're gonna keep on, you know, making sure that we serve those customers.
At the same time, we've got about a third of the base who kind of, you know, p- sometimes use the weekly edition, sometimes they're using it on a more daily basis.
And then we have about a third of the base who are looking for a much more frequent experience from The Economist through the course of the week.
And I would say we are still tuning our model to m- work out how we serve all three of those constituents, right?
Because it's quite a different experience for serving up to the person who opens up their physical product in the post on a Saturday morning to somebody who fires up the app on a Tuesday afternoon.
And what are they looking for from The Economist?
And those people who are kind of coming in on a digital-only subscription and are digital native, they're younger in general, they're more diverse, and you know, what-- they're, they're time poor, you know, they're kind of used to-- they n- they're used to finding things quickly and moving on quickly and, and we need to create an experience which allows them to taste the quality of The Economist and allows them to enjoy the sort of perspective The Economist brings to these stories.
Not breaking news, as you say, but, but a considered take on the stories that matter. Yeah.
But in a way which is fast and is suited to what they're interested in and is gonna allow them to fit The Economist around their very, very busy schedule. So we're doing a really interesting piece of work at the moment.
We launched a, a, an AI lab earlier this year, and we're just in the process of developing a prototype which is focused on that younger demographic, pure sort of digital-led or digital native demographic.
And you know, for the first time we're looking at, okay, when you look at the, the physical product that is entirely editorially curated, and that's about creating a, a set of stories and, and reports and analyses, which is entirely curated by our editorial team and laid out by the through, by the editors on a Wednesday night.
When you're moving to creating something which is trying to serve that, that sort of shorter, faster consumption pattern that, that, that younger demographic are looking for, you've got to start looking at a different balance between having something which is more personal, more suited to, based to, more tailored to that customer based on their previous usage habits, based on what amount of time they have.
Do they have half an hour where they're walking the dog or do they have a twenty-minute commute on the way to work, having dropped the kids off and fitting around their schedule?
That becomes a very different customer experience to the one that we've traditionally produced.
So the brilliant thing about, you know, whilst AI creates all sorts of, you know, kind of interesting challenges for the publishing sector, it also allows us to start to make our journalism more flexible, more accessible through summarization, personalization, new formats, you know- Mm-hmm...
an audio first experience potentially. We're looking at a whole bunch of different, you know, AI-powered features which create a very, very different way of enjoying- Mm. The Economist on a, on a daily basis. Yeah.
And by the way, a-anyone who has any questions, please pop them into the chat and I'll, I'll get to them shortly. So on that, like talk to me about the AI lab and what you're trying to accomplish there.
I think there's some low-hanging fruit when it comes to translation, for instance. There's- Sure...
a ton of The Economist's, you know, can-- there's-- I have no idea how many like Mandarin speakers who would prefer, you know, to read in Mandarin than in, in, in English and, and there's obviously an opportunity I always think of as versioning, you know?Whether, whether I wanna have the, the, The Economist leaders in, in print, or whether I wanna have it on an app, or whether I, or whether I wanna have it read with a, a, a wonderful, like, you know, Oxford accent, like, you know.
[laughs] It should be, it should be all there. Yeah.
Yeah, so like we're doing a bunch of those things already, and AI is definitely our friend in terms of making our content more easily accessible to a, to, to a variety of different customer types, whether it's the language, whether it's they want it audio, whether they want summaries.
So we're, we're doing all of those things already. We have, in The Economist Espresso app, we have English, we have French, we have German, Spanish, Mandarin.
So you can consume that, all of our journalism in any of those languages at the touch of a button.
We have AI summaries launched in our main app, we have text-to-speech, we have all of our weekly edition k- narrated by, by humans, by actors every single week.
But that comes out on a Thursday, so kind of for anything that we publish ahead of that Thursday, you know, weekly, weekly release of the, of the main edition, we're using text-to-speech to, to bring our, our, our written stories into the audio format because that is becoming so popular with, with many of our customers.
So they're the sort of, they're the basics really, and lots of other people are using similar AI-powered features. The AI lab is, is trying to be much more ambitious in its nature.
So the first part of the process was a really fun part actually, which was thinking about what the world looks like in three years' time, and that's a bit of a fool's errand given how fast the world is moving, you know, to try and work out three years out.
But we came, we met with a bunch of publishers in New York and startups on the West Coast and went to the Nordics where there's some really interesting things happening, and just painted a picture of, okay, where's, where's the AI, where's the LLM world headed?
Where's the world of audio headed? Where's the world of multimodal output headed? What does that mean the consumers are gonna be getting used to and expecting to get from their, from their news publishers?
What does it mean that our competitors are gonna be doing? So we kind of painted this picture of what the world looks like in three years' time. What... I'm sorry. Was it bleak, or what was it?
Give, give us a preview of what The Economist- Well-... sees the world of media looking like in three years.
It kind of depends whether you've got a, like, you know, a, a moderate or a more extreme view of how quickly these things happen, and I think the, we generally are in the more moderate camp.
And I think that means that you're gonna have, you know, the majority of people using LLMs for a wide array of use cases.
Most people are gonna be using agents to do a lot of things that we do, you know, via a browser today. So that means that, you know, you might have...
And, and I, I don't think you reach a world where you've got one or two dominant LLMs. I mean, yeah, it depends on your, your sort of game theory point of view on how the market plays out over the next few years.
But there's, there's gonna be... I, I don't think the market's gonna be captured by one dominant player who could then really dictate the terms of who... You know, they become a true gateway.
I think you're gonna have enough competition in the market that you have three, four material players out there, but people are gonna have fewer apps- You mean the foundational models? Yeah. Yeah. And, and apps.
Yeah, and, and end user apps as well. Yeah. And, you know, kind of those apps are gonna be doing a lot of things for you. So you're not gonna have nearly as many apps on your phone, right? Yeah.
'Cause your, your LLM app is gonna be doing the weekly shopping for you, and booking your flights, and finding you the pair of trainers that you want. Yeah.
And you're gonna do all of that through one single interface, right?
And yeah, and, and so as a result, the number of apps that the average Joe is gonna have on their phone is gonna reduce significantly over the next three, in three years' time. And so the competition- Okay...
to be one of those apps that people are still using directly becomes a lot fiercer. Okay. So you're... So basically it's, uh, that you... This is fascinating.
So like basically there's going to be a bunch of different LLMs probably. Yeah. You know, there's not gonna be just a couple, right?
But there's gonna be, it's gonna be more agentic, so people are gonna be, instead of us going to information, information is basically going to come to us, right? Yep. Yeah.
And so the, directly downloading a publisher app will be like a Hunger Games kind of thing.
You're not gonna have, I don't know, the average person might have like 60 apps on their phone, they use like 20, they'll just have a few, right? Like- Right. That's exactly right. That number will dwindle.
So, uh, Hunger Games is a good analogy.
Like it's, it's, it's definitely gonna be more competitive than it is today, and a lot of, a lot of those end user news publishers are gonna become agentic powered, and their business model's gonna have to change accordingly, and there may not be that much mo- that much, you know, money in that model to be totally frank.
Yeah. Which is why you have to think very, very hard about what you have to do to be one of those apps that people still have on their phone and they, they use. Well, I think one of the thing you have to...
is do you wanna try to be one of those apps? Yeah. Right? Because- For sure... there is, there is a- For sure. I think the, the answer for the majority of companies is this is not a fight we can compete in- Right...
so we wanna supply the, the apps that are there, you know? Yep. Like whether that's Apple News is gonna get through. Uh, you know, there's lots of different aggregators, as we've seen. The aggregators always win.
And if you control the interface, you control pretty much the commanding heights of the digital economy. And so I think that there's going to be some publishers who look at that and say, "We'll be wholesalers.
We're gonna wholesale our content to a bunch of people who control the interface." Yeah, for sure.
And, and it's really interesting seeing even, you know, some of the big e-commerce companies already, already starting to do deals with the ChatGPTs of this world and, and realizing that a big part of their business is gonna be, is gonna be conducted through that LLM interface.
And, and then- Okay.
Like, so you're still gonna, you're still gonna have a print product in three years that is, is niche and expensive, and people wanna like still have it, like in first class on, on, on flights and next to them.
We're planning to. And, and look, we've got a, we've got a very loyal print base, customer base. You know, we've had them stay healthy for many years, and we wanna keep on serving them for that time. Yeah.
And we, we don't, we don't see that going away.
I think we're backing ourselves, I mean, we would do, but this is where it comes to the sort of the three main things that we're doing to try and-Ensure that we have a seat at the table or an app on the phone in three years' time.
And the first is, as I said, you know, kind of what Insider is the beginning of, which is doubling down on, on that human-crafted, artisanal journalistic endeavor and, and making sure that, you know, the, the mix of our text output versus audio output versus video output is already changing and will continue to change over the next few years.
Yes. So we create something which is really differentiated, which you can't get in an AI news aggregator.
And by the way, we're not doing deals with AI aggregators, so we've, we've passed on, on all opportunities that have come our way so far because we don't want to create the habit that customers think they can find The Economist content on ChatGPT.
We want to, we want to maintain that direct relationship. Mm. So that's the first thing that we're doing. The s- the second thing we're doing is AI Lab, creating what we believe is gonna be, you know...
Because people have become more and more used to multimodal output, like if they want it in video, they will have it in video, if they want it in audio, they have it in audio.
We, we wanna, we wanna create a very different experience from what the app is today. If you open The Economist app today, it's kind of the printed product within an app interface.
It's the same content, it's the same articles, it's broadly speaking the same experience.
That needs to change profoundly to, as I said, hold, bring in and hold onto that younger demographic, the next generation of customers for The Economist, and that's where AI is our friend because we think we can create very, very personal interfaces and very personal experiences where you are being guided, say by a, by a, by a voice-led host through The Economist experience.
You can very easily shape that to the amount of time you have available to the sort of the themes or the stories that you're most interested in. You start to create a very, very different experience.
If you, if you think the experience today is at the weekend I sit down, or historically the experience would be like sit down with my...
You sit down, as you said, Brian, with your, with your print- printed magazine, and you look at the pa- the table of contents, and you say, "Okay, I like the sound of that, that, and that."
You know, and you work your way through five, 10 different stories. You give yourself an hour of brain food, and that's like a really satisfying, complete experience. Oh, I go start to finish. I go, I, I go wire to wire.
I like it. I like it. I didn't wanna make any assumptions, but- [laughs]... that puts, that definitely puts you in the elite, in the elite- I slow down a little bit in the back when it gets to the- [laughs] I know...
financial tables, but- Okay, fair enough. I think that's reasonable if you're starting at the beginning. What is the equivalent of that, that 20-minute experience?
If I have 20 minutes on my commute, how do we win that person's attention for that time?
And actually, I think The Economist does, does, does three things very well in that longer form version, which I think we can do in a shorter form version as well.
It tells you what to think on the, on the stories that you care about.
It actually tells you about the stories you didn't know were important, so you, you end up reading about something which is really important that wasn't on your radar.
And the third thing is it, it, it brings you some sort of quirky, amusing, more humorous stories of, of, you know, kind of slow cooking in, in Bulgaria or, you know, the trend for- [laughs]...
you know, a certain toy type in China. It just brings you that, that quirky story that you, you know, kind of- Yeah... get a bit of a reward, bit, a bit of a payoff almost for your, for your Economist consumption.
And so what is the, what is the, the digital daily version of that which fits into a might be five minutes, might be 25 minutes, but is like completely tailored to that end user's needs in a way which at the moment we, we don't, we don't tailor to the end user's needs.
So that's, that's what AI Lab is all about. Um- Okay, so that is gonna come out with like a new version of like the app or like the experience of The Economist? Is, is that to...
Explain like what, what, what we're gonna see out of that. Yeah, so it'll be, it'll be a very different user interface.
It's likely to be, you know, uh, audio's gonna be a really important part of the experience, both in terms of how you control the app and how you decide what you want, and then how you consume, because I think we, our content is so well suited to, you know, being on the move or being on a commute or walking the dog, whatever it might be.
Like we- Yeah... we, we think that our content is, is, can fit around people's lives much better through this medium.
And yeah, so, you know, th- through, through those, through being multimodal and through being tailored based on- Mm...
people's habitual usage patterns, you know, your experience of The Economist on a Tuesday will be really quite different from my experience. Okay.
We had a question from Sterling Proffer who had, had, had talked about like basically what I said about the, how the voice of The Economist is such a hallmark of the brand, right?
But then he also talked about how, you know, a lot of the attention is shifting to individual voices, particularly on social media, and he referenced Kaila Scanlon, who's a creator who I think is, is tremendous because, you know, I think a lot of times creators are, are in fluffy areas and, and Kaila is about economics, and she's very popular, particularly among younger people.
And she does work with, with, with Bloomberg and, and others.
How do you end up thinking about both creating these, you know, elevating these, these voices from within The Economist that make like the core product, but also this, you know, whether there's a role for The Economist to be a curator of these more, I wanna say almost like digitally native creators?
Obviously everyone operates, you know, in the digital environment, but there are certain like creators who are just, I don't know, they were just born for it. They were made for this [laughs].
They're not trying to retrofit for being good at, at written journalism. Look, I have a lot of time and respect for those people.
We've, we've talked about whether we could be a kind of curator for some of those third parties, but that's not currently in our plans, just to be totally transparent. We've, we- Yeah...
we think we've got enough mileage to keep on expanding what The Economist produces and, you know, keep on ensuring that that tone of voice, you know, infuses everything that we, everything that we make.
And, and that people come to us...
I guess the reason we don't wanna do it is because people come to us because they know that they're gonna get a very, very, very consistent brand experience, to your point around that tonality- Yeah...
and the, and, and, and that goes back to why we haven't scaled the newsroom further, why we maintain the, the, the production model that we still have, which is this sort of, you know, handcrafted model because-It's like walking into an Hermes shop.
You know exactly what that experience is gonna be.
You might not, you know, be able to afford it on that particular day of the week, but you know what you're gonna get, and, and it's always gonna be of the very, very highest quality, and it's gonna be very, very, you know, kind of distinctive.
So that's what we-- that's how we think about The Economist experience. How do you think about the talent question, though, right?
Because, you know, I always thought, like, what the, the biggest strength of The Economist is that, like, you-- it almost reads as if it's written by one person, right?
And it's almost like it, it's, it, it, it reads that way, you know. And that breaks down when you get into multimodal. When you get into voice, there's obviously differences. Video, it's gonna be different. Yeah.
And I wonder about, like, carrying that through and also the opportunity but also risk of, like, developing talent.
You know, this is something that comes up with, with publishers all the time when we have our breakfast and dinner forums about how they wanna develop, like, sort of in-house talent, but there is, like, some sort of, like, feeling like, well, I don't wanna build, like, a franchise around a person who then gets Sub Stack curious.
Right. Right.
It's, it's a good question, and I, I've unlimited admiration for how Zanny manages her talent, you know, because she does an extremely good job of, of not just recruiting but then retaining our best people for a long time.
And, and it is a striking feature of our newsroom that many of our people have been there for twenty, thirty plus years and, and have really been there from the ground up.
They might have gone and done a, a short stint at the FT, but they've, they've nearly always come back.
So, you know, there's, there's something quite compelling about it, and I spend, you know, lucky to spend a lot of time on the, you know, the, the, the, the, on the floor above us in our, in our headquarters.
And I spend a lot of time on that floor and, you know, in the editorial meetings.
And there are not many places that allow you to have the quality of debates and write on the, on the quality, the, the sort-- I guess the, the variety of stories that we cover.
You know, we don't just kind of, kind of cover the main news. We do cover the stories that you didn't know that you cared about. We do cover those quirkier numbers as well.
And so I think there's this combination of incredible intellectual rigor with a freedom to follow your nose and to, you know, write about the things that interest you if you've got a strong enough or an interesting enough viewpoint.
And I think that's a very powerful combination. And so yeah, even before we introduced podcasts, before we launched Insider just a few weeks ago, our retention rate of that top talent was very, very good.
Now, you raise a pretty interesting question. As we start to sort of bring more personalities onto the screen, they inevitably have a different voice, right?
So Shashank Joshi, our defense editor, is presenting insights inside defense.
But, you know, if you take Inside Tech, the first episode of which aired last night, Tom Standage, our brilliant deputy editor and, and, and sort of longtime tech writer, is a completely different personality.
And so you start to get some variances in that tonality. Yeah. But they've all been there so long.
The, the, the, the, the attention to detail and the, the rigor that goes into their thinking, their arguments, they might communicate differently.
They might have different senses of humor, but there's that consistency and that rigor and that, and that sort of fact-based journalism that they, they're producing. So final topic is around your events business.
Something that always comes up these days with publishers are events. And, and The Economist has, has put on a, a tremend-- it puts on a tremendous amount of events. I always see- Yeah...
the ads for Sustainability Week and various other niche events a lot of times. But you see, we see new entrants like Semaphore that are positioning themselves as w-- almost more events company than, than publisher.
I mean, it's, it's a model that I know well from B2B. It's like most B2B publishers are events businesses with publishing on the front end. How do you guys see your events business? It's not like, you know... I know,
I know that, like, I don't know how you actually grew, but The Economist Impact, which, uh, houses it, is not like- Yeah... a growth engine for, for the business.
And it's surprising to me in some ways because so many business publishers in particular, you know, they just wanna events, events, events.
And that's usually to me, if they haven't been doing events for a while and all of a sudden they, like, discovered events, that means that their, their core businesses are doing really poorly.
So how do you end up thinking about events? 'Cause again, tremendous brand, a, a great area, a tr- a, a lot of opportunity.
Events, however, have, have their nuances that [chuckles] you know, they're-- it's a pain once you get into the events business. Yeah, look, I think it's a great question.
An event-- just to be clear, events have been l- is a, is a... We've got a nice events business which have been growing- Yeah...
healthy the last few years, so it's definitely an important part of our, our business, so we're, you know, three hundred and fifty million pound, three hundred and seventy million pound business, and a hundred million pounds of that is our impact business, and events is a big chunk of that.
So it's a, it's a good and important part of our business.
I think, I think what Semaphore are doing that is really interesting is they're sort of placing events on a par with their written output in terms of their journalistic endeavor.
So they see events as a core channel for their editorial output, and they've started in that position.
Now, th- like many, many sort of businesses that have been around for a longer time, you know, publishing businesses, The Economist core business is, is our written product historically and increasingly our, our audio and video, and then events is a secondary business.
And, and so I think we start from a different position, and actually I've fi- I've been, been really impressed by what Semaphore achieve, but it's also sort of starting to cause us to think a bit differently about events, because they are actually a really powerful way to disseminate your journalism.
And I think historically, because we have this smaller newsroom and we've deliberately not expanded that newsroom aggressively, it's meant that there's a natural resource constraints on how much we can put into events.
Now, as events and live experiences become ever more important, and I do think, you know, one of the things that when we're doing our future gazing for the AI Lab, the importance of live experiences continues to grow, and so we see that as an area that we want toPay close attention to and, and see more as an opportunity to also promote our, and, and practice our journalism, right?
In a way that historically has probably been seen as a secondary outlet. How does it become a more, more interesting, more important outlet for our journalism? Right.
But your events business right now are typically s- uh, you don't have, like, a massive flagship event. There's no- We don't... like- No...
Economist festival where I can go and, I don't know, meet Bartlebee or something. Not right now, no. [laughs] But, like, so most of the events you're doing are... I mean, they're fairly niche. You know what I mean? Yeah.
They're in, like, you know, capital markets and, and things of that nature. I assume that they're either single sponsor or a couple of sponsor. They're not, like...
So I guess that's the part of e- events that I think about, that a lot of these businesses have almost, like, a B2B sort of events business that is, like, not totally integrated, I feel like, all the times with the journalistic product.
Tell me if I'm wrong [laughs] about the opportunity as the brand to- Yeah...
you know, 'cause, like, I always go back, and I understand what, like, you know, Justin and the team there are doing 'cause they look at, like, Davos, this massive event, right? That there's this, like, massive business.
And it's just like- Yeah... you end up thinking. It's like when I was at, like, Adweek, I'm like, "Why didn't Adweek create Can?" Like, oh, like, that makes sense. Right. Like- Yeah, I think...
Look, Justin, who, who started out at The Economist as it happens, I think is, has been really smart in, in, in how they focus that business on sort of creating a Davos equivalent, right?
Which is B2B, by the way, just to be clear. That's B2B rather than B2C. Yeah, yeah. Um- Yeah.
But it, but it's editorially led, and I think along with many other news publishers that have been around for a while, our b- our business has been B2B, but... and it's been, you know, kind of...
We, you know, we obviously take great care in the quality of our events, but it's a sponsorship model, and that's how we've built our events business. Yeah, that's what I mean by B2B. Yeah.
B2B events to me are sponsor-driven, right? Right. And when you get more into, like, the Davo, you're, you're gonna- you're in a different category, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
Although I, I, I don't know, I don't know for sure, but I would've thought that- Yeah... Semafore's events are mainly sponsor. No, no, no, they're sponsor. They are. That's true. Yeah.
But, but I just think what they've done, which is smart, is they've thought about events as a great platform for their journalism, and I think that's where there's an opportunity for us to think differently as well.
Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, let us leave us there. We're after, like, six minutes of the hour.
Sort of just to, like, wrap up, when you're thinking about this, you know, three year, three years out, and I think all publishers, I love that you're, you're actually thinking this, 'cause I always ask, I always ask media companies executives, I'm like, "What does your business look like in three years?"
And I get a lot of misdirection and [laughs] stuff. Yeah. Like, people are like, "Ah, I don't wanna talk about that." I'm like, "That's not a good sign." And I understand it.
But, like, what do you think of when you, you went through that exercise, what do you think are...
'Cause I like to think about the sort of Jeff Bezos thing of, like, focus on the things that won't change versus what is gonna change, 'cause you're just kinda, like, guessing with things that are gonna change, particularly in a time like this.
But what do you... When you went through that exercise, what do you think of the things that aren't gonna change for a brand like The Economist?
Well, look, we, we go through profound, you know, global upheaval, right, in geopolitics and economics and technology.
So the whole world is changing around us in, in myriad ways and, you know, the exercise we ran showed that the, the way consumers are gonna live their lives in three years' time is gonna be very different.
But the thing that I think remains more valuable than ever is what The Economist offers, and that is a independent, fact-based, fearless point of view on, on the world's stories.
And, you know, in a, in a world of AI-generated news and, you know, the level of misinformation, disinformation that will only continue to grow, we do believe that that human-created and crafted, fact-based, independent, rigorous perspective that we create, you know, that, that kind of has a, a, an impact and an expertise well beyond the scale of our customer base, that's what's gonna remain unchanging.
And I think so much of what we do when I think about the three-year plan and the strategy, I start with what are the things about The Economist that are most precious that we need to build on, we need to preserve?
And that is above all our editorial independence and our editorial quality. And everything we do really is in service to those things. So they- that has to remain unchanging.
The format in which we serve it up, the experience which we create for our customers to make the most of that journalism will change significantly in the next three years.
But the quality of that output and the, and the, the level of rigor and attention to detail in that output and the scale that we operate at to make sure that the quality is where it needs to be is not gonna change fundamentally at all.
In fact, it is gonna stay, it's gonna stay just the same. Okay. And do you have, like, a big subscriber number for those three years, or no?
We're a privately held company, Brian, so, you know, I know the New York Times- Okay... like to flash their numbers around on their quarterly earnings, but we keep those things to ourselves, I'm afraid.
[laughs] Fair enough. All right, Luke. Thank you very much, and thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Brian. Appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. Work it out. Take care. Bye. [outro music]