It’s a busy and exciting week for The Spectator in America: we are putting together our first US edition. It’s beautiful and big: an 84-page book, perfect bound, with a glossy cover. We’ve been pleased with the number of early-bird subscribers, and I’m pretty confident we will be able to reward them with a great magazine, the likes of which they haven’t read before.
The Spectator’s brand of journalism is unique, and we are confident that it can thrive in America. We aren’t publishing stories in order to tell our readers how to think. We aren’t politics bores. We aren’t interested in shaping the conservative or any other movement. We are The Spectator: our highest priority is to provide our readers with engaging, beautifully written and entertaining copy.
The US edition will exhibit all that. It will have strong views of its own but it will not be narrowly ideological. Writers will be allowed to disagree with the magazine’s editorial line and with other contributors. That’s the Spectator way.
The magazine will be available largely through subscription, with limited newsstand distribution in New York and Washington DC to begin with. Subscriptions for the print and digital bundle will be $7.99 a month (first month free and you can cancel anytime) and $3.99 a month for digital-only.
The UK edition of The Spectator is now the fastest-growing magazine in Europe. The US edition of The Spectator will include all the ingredients that have made the UK edition such a success, but will be published monthly rather than weekly and with a distinctive focus on America and the global developments that affect it. So there will be penetrating, original analysis and commentary on American and world politics.
We launched a digital edition of the magazine, Spectator USA, (spectatorstage.wpengine.com), in the spring of 2018. It has enjoyed steady growth and increased recognition ever since, with website traffic growing on average 20 percent month-on-month. This encouraged us to launch a US print edition to complement its digital play.
The first US edition includes articles from many great established Spectator writers — Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarke, Julie Bindel, Toby Young, Lionel Shriver and Cosmo Landesman — as well as new American voices, such as Roger Kimball, Bridget Phetasy, Peter Wood, Madeleine Kearns (sort of), and P.J. O’Rourke. We think it makes for a jolly and engaging mix and we hope you agree. Subscribe now and take advantage of our introductory offer, which gives you unlimited digital access and the print magazine for three months at a price of $9.99, then for $23.99 a quarter thereafter.
