The Economist, one of the world's preeminent business publications, has always stood out from the crowd. It is printed in a magazine format and yet styles itself a newspaper. There are no bylines. There are plenty of opinions - all firm. And it yields no ground on subscription fees, both to new subscribers and old. One more thing: it claims not to be advertising dependent, even while that revenue stream is important to the organization.

All put together, the 172-year-old Economist is an outlier among weekly media titles, most of whom are floundering for lack of steady ad revenue and loyal paying subscribers. But even with The Economist, which is half owned by the Financial Times newspaper, reality requires acknowledgment. Readers are fleeing print to digital media, especially smartphones and tablets. Hence the launch of The Economist mobile site and a flagship application that is a mirror of the weekly newspaper. The latest app on the block is Espresso, a daily digest of short stories for readers who are time-starved.  

"[The Espresso app] tries to do on a daily basis what the weekly does on a weekly basis," said Tom Standage, deputy editor and head of digital strategy on The Economist, London. "Which is, you haven?t gotten much time, just read this you don?t have to read anything else. We?ll decide what the things you need to know about are. You can trust us. That?s the kind of message that we?re sending."

While the name would suggest so, The Economist goes beyond business to cover international news, politics, business, finance, science and technology news. While print and online are key mediums, a vital pivot is to mobile where many of its readers have migrated for their consumption of news and analysis.

In this detailed Q&A with Mobile Marketer, Mr. Standage discusses The Economist's take on mobile, its content and advertising strategies and the latest audio focus with the podcasts, as well as the heavy emphasis on subscriptions to generate stable revenue. Please read on.

How does The Economist view mobile?
Well, I suppose the place to start is that we kind of don?t. 

We try not to think too much about the platform and we try to think about what jobs we do for our readers and so we aren?t too hung up on the distinction between print and digital either.

We?re kind of agnostic about the platforms that people want to use to consume what we write. 

That said, mobile is clearly emerging as the most important platform. 

So we?ve made an exception and with [daily news app] Espresso we?ve actually made a new product with a new kind of content for mobile, so that?s the kind of recognition of the importance of mobile. 

But, once again, what we?re trying to do is still do the same jobs for our readers that we?ve always done on a weekly basis in print and more recently in digital.

The three jobs are to be a trusted filter on world affairs, so in other words, being a filter that so distills all the stuff that is happening in the week so that you can have a finite amount of it so that you can actually get through and get to the end of it. So we wanted to kind of be antidote to information overload. 

The second is trend-spotting to be a guide to the future and the third is to be an advocate of positive and progressive change. 

So that?s what we?ve always done in print, that we?ve taken the same content that we?ve done and distributed that on digital. 

What we?ve done with Espresso is we?ve tried to make a ? you know, if we were starting today and we were a startup, we would try to express those values, how would we do it and we think Espresso is the result. 

So it tries to do on a daily basis what the weekly does on a weekly basis. Which is you haven?t gotten much time, just read this you don?t have to read anything else. We?ll decide what the things you need to know about are. You can trust us. That?s the kind of message that we?re sending. 

Is the content that you deliver in mobile the same or different than for print?
Historically, we haven?t and historically we?ve found that the content that we do in the weekly has worked very well on digital platforms. In particular, it works on tablets and we found that the average time that people spend reading is actually slightly high on tablets than in print even. 

So up to this point, essentially what we?ve been doing is taking that weekly content and delivering it in various different forms, putting it on smartphones, putting it on to tablets, putting it on to e-readers. 

We also have an audio edition, which is a full recording of the entire content done by newsreaders. It?s not a computer voice reading. It?s someone and people use that effect while they?re commuting or they?re working out or whatever. 

So up to last year, we?ve essentially always just had the same content and we distributed onto all these different platforms. But Espresso really is a departure from that because it?s written by the editorial staff and it has the same editorial values, but it really is built for consumption on a smartphone. 

So it has these very, very short articles, 150 words and it always has five of them. It has a very, very brief news summary at the end and that?s it. 

And that?s why it?s called Espresso. It?s a brief shot of information and the idea is that ? and the same way The Economist weekly as opposed to digital and if you could only have one article air-dropped to you, we?d want you to choose The Economist. 

And it?s the same with this and there?s a million daily briefings out there and the idea is that we want to make the one that is the only one you need to read to get an overview of what is going on in the world. 

How do these features enhance the reader experience?
There are two things that we do in digital, whether in mobile or not in mobile generally, but everything we do in digital has to pass one or two of these two tests.

One is how to add value to the existing readers, to the existing subscribers and the second is it has to go out and reach new readers and new viewers, just reach a broader audience.

So some of the things we do, like Economist Radio, fall clearly into the second category. They?re about outreach and they?re about explaining to people that The Economist doesn?t just write about business or finance. 

We?re a weekly newspaper for the world at our core and our daily, we are trying to be the view from the moon, this is everything you need to know that?s going on in the world. 

So that?s the outreach side of things, like podcast and Economist Radio and stuff like that would probably fall into that category.  I think they?re mostly consumed by people that are existing subscribers. 

On the other side, something like Espresso is an added benefit for existing subscribers. They get free access to Espresso, but it also does reach out to new readers, so we are picking up new readers as a result of it. 

Another example would be our explainers or our daily charts. They are an extra feature that you don?t get in the weekly, but that you do get on our Web site and on Facebook and so on.

So they are extra content for subscribers if they want it and they enhance the value of our kind of total package. But they are also extremely effective at reaching new audiences. 

So they manage to tick both of those boxes, so if you take something like our essays, for example, which are these very immersive multimedia pieces that we do, they are essentially an enhancement to the main package. 

There are some benefits that they may reach new people but essentially that is a ? or the China section that we added to The Economist a couple of years ago that is enhancing the core package. 

These are the sorts of things that are enhancing the core other things reach-out to new audiences. Some of our products do both. 

How does advertising work?
I can tell you how it works but obviously I?m an editorial person so. But essentially, the unusual thing about The Economist is that we always have the majority of our revenue from subscriptions. 

So, advertising, we?ve nearly always been profitable without the need for advertising, so even if advertising disappeared over night we would still be sustainable and profitable news organization. 

So obviously advertising is an important thing for us and we think we have a very good audience that?s very attractive to advertisers. So it?s not something that we think is something that we?re sort of writing of but it is less important to our business model and that is less of the case of other news organizations and in particular if you look at the new companies coming into the market now a lot of them have advertising-based business models and I?m not sure that in the long run funding a Web site through advertising is going to work. 

I?m very, very happy that we have essentially a subscription-based model 

If you look at Espresso ? Espresso is available without charge to existing Economist subscribers. So if you have an existing digital subscription or print, you get access to The Economist as well. If not, we want you to pay $2.49 a month for it. 

It is a subscription product and that is sent for it in the model. 

So what?s happening with CPMs going down on advertising and there?s more and more inventory, there?s more and more programmatic buying. It is bad news if your business model is predicated on paying the bills using advertising. I think that is not a business model I would want to pursue and I?m very glad we haven?t pursued it.

How do you still gain subscribers with the large amount of free mobile content? 
Very good question. The answer is having a subscription fee and you can only charge a subscription fee if you can convince people if what you have is worth paying for. 

We don?t just have a subscriber fee. We really have quite a high subscription fee. Subscription fee in the U.S. is $130 for print or digital and $165 for print and digital. 

The next most experienced periodical is The New Yorker, which is something like $70, so we are basically twice as expensive as the next closest company. 

But we do have a circulation of 1.6 million people who are prepared to pay. Well, not all of them are paying that full subscription. There are people on student discounts and that kind of stuff. 

But the point is that we are providing something that enough people are prepared to pay for, that it means we?re a profitable company and I think that?s the right model to have. 

I don?t really think we?re competing with those providers of commodity mobile information. If we were, people wouldn?t be paying us for what we have. 

What is the most important factor for you to be successful in mobile?
We want to be successful across lots of platforms. 

Mobile is an important growing platform, but we?re not building our business model just around mobile. I realize if we were starting today we would, but we have a very large and profitable business on the Web and in print, so mobile is a piece of the mix for us. 

I think the important thing is that we need to ? the newspaper industry generally is just sort of catching up to the fact that the Web is not going away. They have to adapt to it and so they need to kind of switch to integrated publishing, digital-first models, all the kind of standard pin doddery that you know you have to do and there is a model for how you can make all of that work. 

Of course, they are all waking up to this just as actually the game has moved on. It's now about mobile and it?s not about the Web and that?s clearly where things are going and even the way itself is increasingly consumed on mobile. 

So, we obviously have to keep our eyes on the ball. There it is for us, so much parceled sprawled across other things we?re doing. 

But I don?t think there?s a single kind of ? we are not 100 percent focused on mobile. We are focused on a lot of different things. 

Mobile is very important, but it?s not the only thing. 

How did the audio features come about?
The main audio addition is inside the weekly app. So you download the weekly bundle and you push a different button and it downloads the audio, which is like 175 megabytes of audio and then you can listen to that. 

It was just something that we recognized is that the main reason why people canceled subscriptions to The Economist, is that they haven?t got time to read it. They see it piling up and they feel guilty about it. 

We thought, well, hang on, if we have another way that you could consume The Economist without having to read it ?cause we?re aware that the whole basis of what we?re selling is that we are selling to people that haven?t got a lot of time and they want to ingest a lot of information very quickly. 

We sell ourselves as the people you can trust to filter all of that stuff for you and really distill it and just give you the stuff that you need to know and sort of cut to the chase basically. So, we thought it was very in keeping with that sort of philosophy. 

If we did an audio edition, and we have a playlist feature on the app, so you can choose which stories you listen to and which order you listen to them in and that kind of stuff, then we would give people another kind of way to listen to The Economist  when they?re commuting or working out and it will help us retain those subscribers who are canceling because they don?t have time to read it. 

And, anecdotally, we found that it has actually been extremely effective retention too that we get messages from people that they love listening to Economist rather than reading it. So that?s been a good thing to do. 

The podcasts are slightly different. The podcasts we do are a way of sort of putting ourselves out there getting The Economist point of view across and I think also illustrating that The Economist isn?t. 

People who are familiar with the brand may think that all we do is write about economics, so one of our podcasts we do is about business and finance, another one is about technology and another one is probably the close to our mission. It?s called The Week Ago. It comes out Sunday and it tells you what?s going to happen in the next week and trying to work out the shape of the future is very much essential to our mission. 

So that?s what we?re really trying to do across all these platforms. 

Espresso you read it first thing in the morning and its trying to tell you what?s going to happen today, what you should look out for, why it matters and what to expect. 

What the weekly is doing is telling you what?s going to happen next week, but also what the big trends are, what is shaping the future and what you need to understand and what you need to get your head around. 

So that?s really essential to what we do across the board. 

What?s in your mobile future?
We?re looking at the potential in mobile to allow us to publish in languages other than English and we are about to launch our first bilingual app. 

I can?t say anymore than that but basically it lets you flip between English and another language. 

So we think that would be very interesting because it will allows us to reach a much wider audience and people who don?t read English but also it will be for people who read The Economist in English as a second language and find it a bit difficult. 

We think this will be an extremely useful tool because it will allow people to actually improve their English because you can flip just one paragraph. So we think that will be interesting. 

We?re going to launch in a particular language shortly and we hope to add other languages to the same app. 

So we think other languages ? again, that is something that mobile makes possible. 

We could not do that in the era of print. It?s just not feasible to do what we?re doing, to translate all of that stuff and print it and deliver it and apps mean that we can deliver all over the world and instantly. We think that?s very exciting, so that?s another product that is on the way. 

Our readership for the weekly on mobile, we have a weekly readership of 750,000.

That?s both subscribers and people who are reading the editors? picks, which are free in our app. 

On Espresso, we?ve had 600,000 downloads and we have a weekly reach on Espresso of about 200,000. 

I think those are the important numbers. 

About 175,000 of the weekly subscribers have activated their free access of Espresso. So that tells you a big chunk of Espresso readers are, in fact, existing Economist subscribers who see espresso as a bonus an extra daily product from The Economist. 

That is very much what we expected. That it would appeal to both existing readers and to new readers. 

But, you know, it?s a competitive market out there. We wanted to have a product in the daily briefing space and we wanted a way to sort of put ourselves in a reader?s daily routines and not just their weekly routines.