The Economist redesigns its app to promote short stories on weekdays and longer reads on weekends

People tend to think of The Economist as a weekend magazine. With the launch of an app redesign, the publisher is trying to encourage readers to see it as an outlet for daily news and analysis.

Starting today, The Economist app’s Home tab layout will change for weekday and weekend news consumption. During the week, the app will lead with a horizontal top stories bar called “The World in Brief,” followed by the day’s latest stories and vertical videos. On the weekends, “The World in Brief” will be pushed further down and the Home tab will promote longer, in-depth stories and opinion and culture writers while a Weekly tab will highlight stories from the week’s print edition.

“In the weekday experience, we tend to select shorter pieces that don’t require the same time commitment, whether you’re on a commute or a lunch break,” Economist president Luke Bradley-Jones said. On weekends, “we’re really leaning into that more immersive, slower consumer experience.”

Bradley-Jones said the redesign has been in the works for nearly a year and is the latest effort to make the publication more accessible to both new and existing readers. The publication has a “relatively leaky bucket” when it comes to subscriber retention, he said, which he attributed to “not having a product experience that makes the consumption of our journalism as delightful as possible.”

The Economist’s desktop usage has been relatively flat; most growth is coming from the app. The app had more than 270 million active visits for the year ending in March 2025, up from 239 million the previous year. (The company wouldn’t share total subscriber or churn numbers, but a spokesperson said 85% of new subscribers are digital-only.)

The redesign aims to make content easier to find. The app’s Home tab previously stacked sections on top of each other and left users unsure of what was coming next, Bradley-Jones said. With a new menu bar, readers swipe through sections horizontally, then scroll stories vertically.

For instance, it previously took “three or four different clicks” to find U.S.-related content, Bradley-Jones said. “Now, as soon as you open your Home tab, it’s right there.”

The redesign launch is part of The Economist’s broader mission to “future-proof” its brand. In March 2025, the publication created a dedicated tab for vertical video within the app after seeing record video growth on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. People were increasingly watching The Economist’s one- to three-minute videos, “and we weren’t making that easy enough to find within our own product,” Bradley-Jones said.