Another benefit to reading a weekly news source versus a daily is that the average quality is higher, since the most important N stories in a week are going to be a better overall sample than the most important N/7 stories each day integrated over the same week.

The Economist also has great round-the-world coverage, which is more than can be said for most news sources.

Couldn’t agree more. Read books and The Economist, skip the dailies.

The Economist is definitely a high-brow, low-fluff, high-density publication. I love it. Articles are usually short enough that you can get through them in a just a minute and they have a good graphics department that makes clear, readable graphs that actually provide an added value instead of filling in some empty space. Shows that it is possible to stick to the message.

For political reporting it seems like Politico is sticking to the same formula (at least Politico.eu), which explains their popularity.

Their writing style is also great, it feels very British: slightly sarcastic and with lots of clever puns.