"This is what we tend to forget when we talk about journalism’s evolution: The news brand, in the past — for all its exclusivity, for all its anonymity — was much more than a brand, with all the corporateness and cravenness that that term can imply. It was also an identity. It was a purchased proxy for a personal worldview. A subscription to the Times — even a newsstand purchase of the Times — meant something both public and, even more importantly, intimate. The news brand was, in its way, an externalized self, a reflection — often aspirational — of the way its consumers took part in the tumult of human events."
Yet another reason The Economist is trouncing competitors » Nieman Journalism Lab
