I read most of The Economist every week, although sometimes I do tend to skip a few articles in the Britain and Asia sections.

I used to read The Economist on a regular basis as well, along with FP and FA. But over time, it has lost a lot of its appeal, being steadily replaced by blogging academics and research papers for me. All those mags serve a sort of middle ground between research and journalism, my reading habits have moved to a more polarized model.

I tried doing this for a while, but actually, it's hard work picking out blogs that do good writing, and thoughtful/incisive commentary.

Plus, when you find ones that do, they invariably only keep it up for a few months to a year because it's so much damn hard work to write and research well.

Much easier just to pluck an economist of the shelves at the bookstore than to continually refresh your rss feeds.

What interesting blogging academics do you read? Finding alternative sources online is still left to chance. I like reading the economist but it's not always available everywhere in my country (France).

Agreed, Economist is very well made. I don't read it every week, but maybe every second - usually when I'm flying and have the time.

It's definitely mistitled, and a better title is sitting right there in the article:

the grand experiment in free online content has failed

Although ad-supported is not quite the same thing as free, so that is also subtly wrong.

I don't think this is correct, though. I think the free content model has actually been spectacularly successful. If you don't agree, I don't know what you've been reading for the last 20-odd years. It just hasn't replicated the form of old magazines.

That's why I think the webmag model has failed but also why I predicted that would happen back when dial-up ruled the country and there was lots of talk about webmags. They are a transitional product, not an endpoint. Blogs, however, are an endpoint and they've only become more important as people have adapted to how web content wants to work.