While Time and Newsweek saw dou­ble digit falls in rev­enue last year, The Econ­o­mist saw sim­i­lar sized gains—despite increas­ing sub­scrip­tion rates (pre­vi­ously).

The Atlantic dis­cusses this phe­nom­e­non, look­ing in detail at why The Econ­o­mist is thriv­ing in a mar­ket seem­ingly in decline.

The Econ­o­mist prides itself on clev­erly dis­till­ing the world into a rea­son­ably com­pact sur­vey. Another word for this is blog­ging, or at least what blog­ging might be after it matures—meaning, after it tran­scends its cur­rent sta­tus as a free-fire zone and set­tles into a more com­pre­hen­sive sys­tem of gath­er­ing and pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion. As a result, although its self-marketing sub­tly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Econ­o­mist has reached its cur­rent level of influ­ence and impor­tance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undi­gested, undi­gestible infor­ma­tion online con­tin­ues to metas­ta­size. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

True, The Econ­o­mist vir­tu­ally never gets scoops, and the infor­ma­tion it does pro­vide is avail­able else­where … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that infor­ma­tion is infi­nitely replic­a­ble and per­va­sive, orig­i­nal report­ing will never again receive its due. The real value of The Econ­o­mist lies in its smart analy­sis of every­thing it deems worth knowing—and smart pack­ag­ing, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the dig­i­tal age.

It’s worth not­ing that The Atlantic is being quite mod­est with this piece—it too has rein­vented itself recently, no doubt increas­ing its read­er­ship greatly.

The article’s not per­fect, though; it states that “almost no one links to The Econ­o­mist” and that “it sits primly apart from the orgy of link love else­where on the Web” while “[remain­ing] pri­mar­ily a print prod­uct”. I dis­agree on all these points.

I did, how­ever, like this insight:

Newsweek­lies were intended to be coun­ter­pro­gram­ming to news­pa­pers, back when we were drown­ing in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity.

I’m ask­ing myself, could the suc­cess of The Econ­o­mist be attrib­uted to its evo­lu­tion from news­pa­per coun­ter­pro­gram­ming to coun­ter­pro­gram­ming for the “undi­gested, undi­gestible infor­ma­tion online”?