“We’re going to turn things around by being like The Economist.” That line is beginning to rival “10 secrets to perfect abs” for the title of most overused magazine cliché. It has been a mantra for America’s weekly news magazines for three years now, and as The New York Times reported last week, it has spread to several other magazine genres.

It’s a logical impulse. While other magazines are hemorrhaging readers and laying off staff, The Economist's circulation has doubled in the past seven years and its ad pages have steadily increased, even as it remains unusually expensive to both readers and advertisers.

But while raising subscription and newsstand prices might not be a bad idea, trying to imitate The Economist in other ways is a fool’s errand. The news weeklies can never be like The Economist, no matter how hard they try. Here are the four main reasons why.4. They don’t understand what The Economist is

Time and Newsweek seem to think The Economist is an opinion journal, and that emulating it is simply a matter of adding more analysis, a stronger editorial viewpoint, and maybe cleverer covers. In 2006, Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham told the New York Observer, “The Economist doesn’t even attempt to do original reporting, particularly.” He’s wrong. Last week's Economist, a typical issue, published stories datelined Tallinn, Colombo, and Lagos. A little help for you Newsweek readers out there: those cities are located in Estonia, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. But instead of filling their articles with self-serving quotes from government ministers you’ve never heard of, The Economist’s correspondents just give you the essential facts and a meaningful takeaway, whether the information came from their own reporting, the local press, or some obscure think tank.

3. They can’t win over the finance crowd

In a quote that The Economist leveraged for one of its savvy ad campaigns, billionaire Larry Ellison said, “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.” The magazine has managed to become the other must-read for financial types (the first being The Wall Street Journal). What the lay reader may not realize when perusing The Economist’s dispatches from all corners of the globe is that these articles are serving up actionable information designed to help investors figure out what to do with their money. Case in point: this week’s piece on Sri Lanka laid out the dire humanitarian situation there in the wake of a mini civil war, but it also looked forward to what the government will need to do in order to achieve reconciliation and financial stability. Newly stable countries offer excellent investment opportunities; countries torn by endless insurgencies, not so much.

2. There aren’t that many readers up for grabs

There’s a limited market for what The Economist offers, and they’ve already claimed the vast majority of it. As media columnist Jon Friedman wrote last year, “there are only so many Americans smart enough to enjoy [The Economist’s] articles.” I disagree with Friedman slightly. Reading The Economist is not like reading Thomas Pynchon—the articles are short and straightforward, and they never use a 50-cent word when a five-cent word will do. The real problem isn’t intelligence but interest; there are only so many Americans who actually care about international news. Sure, we like to read about wars and disasters and scandals, but we don’t need a weekly update on Japan’s political malaise or the energy business in Brazil. And although The Economist's U.S. audience has grown impressively, it started from an extremely low baseline (ten years ago its North American circulation was barely 300,000) and is still nowhere near Time in terms of circulation. As former Economist editor Bill Emmott told The Guardian in 2005, “We will never be a direct competitor to Time or Newsweek.”

1. They can’t match the snob appeal

Every eight years someone writes a well-argued take-down of The Economist. The most popular charge, which James Fallows first articulated in The Washington Post in 1991, is that people just carry the magazine around to look sophisticated. Its readers, Fallows complained, are in thrall to its “smarty-pants English attitudes” and “Oxbridge swagger&#8221. (The next big hit job came from Andrew Sullivan, writing in the New Republic in 1999, followed by a briefer one from Tom Scocca in the New York Observer in 2007). While Fallows and his fellows tend to be too dismissive of the magazine’s merits, they’re right about its snob appeal. All the ingredients are there. It is a relatively recent foreign import with a distinguished pedigree and a significantly higher price than its competitors. It has an inscrutable title (much like another magazine we know and love) that is clearly not designed to appeal to the masses. And ah, those delightful British spellings and expressions! Of course people like to be seen reading it and to tell all their friends how wonderful it is. The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks—millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride. Reading The Economist or drinking cat-poop coffee shouldn’t be either, but as the quirky lead sentence of an Economist article might say, “Human beings are peculiar in many ways.”