On Wednesday, The Economist launched its own ChatGPT app — the first of its kind by a major consumer news publication. “The Economist – Graphs” runs natively inside ChatGPT and allows users to interact with the publication’s data visualizations.
At launch, the app is focused solely on U.S. polling data. After installing the app, ChatGPT users can use it to ask questions about The Economist’s ongoing Donald Trump approval rating tracker, which offers a variety of charts and data points broken down by state, demographic, and voting issue.
The app is The Economist’s attempt to reach more than 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT where they are.
“Younger audiences are adopting tools like ChatGPT as a first port of call for answering questions or finding information. It’s increasing dramatically, and that’s not a trend that passes us by,” Josh Muncke, the vice president of generative AI at The Economist, told me. The team wanted to see “if we could build something relatively quickly and relatively lightweight that would allow us to test this new way of discovering content from The Economist.”
Back in December, OpenAI rolled out its app store, allowing brands to create third-party experiences within ChatGPT for the first time. These apps go beyond the “no-code,” tailored AI assistants — or CustomGPTs — that are available in the GPT Store. Instead, developers can build out their own interfaces and chat logic. ChatGPT apps are built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that helps ChatGPT connect its models to external tools and data sources. All apps need to be submitted to OpenAI for review before they can appear in the app store.
While some market and business intelligence platforms, like MT Newswires and Dow Jones’ Factiva have already launched ChatGPT apps, so far The Economist is out front among consumer news publications. According to Muncke, his team at The Economist began working seriously on app development at the start of this year.
Currently, The Economist has no AI licensing deals with OpenAI or other major commercial AI developers. In part, the decision to narrow the initial pilot of the app to U.S. polling data was to minimize the chance of undercutting The Economist’s subscription offerings, or give ChatGPT access to too much of its content for free. Muncke’s team worked closely with The Economist’s data journalists and reporters to put up guardrails and fine-tune the app’s visual presentation.
“The Trump tracker is already an experience that is in front of our paywall,” said Muncke, referring to the underlying project that lives on The Economist’s site. “We thought we can explore this surface that as a publisher we think is important [without] directly exposing the depths of some of our premium written content.”
The app launch comes in the midst of a high-stakes midterm election cycle, just after Trump hit an all-time low net approval rating (-24) across his two presidential terms.
For users curious about how Trump is polling leading up to November, the app can answer questions about which state has the highest Trump approval rating, how his approval ratings compare to his first term, and how popular he is among young voters, among other queries. The focus on charts and other visualizations is meant to offer an experience distinct from what a user might get in a basic written response from ChatGPT about polling news.
The Economist hopes the app will build brand awareness among younger audiences. In general, ChatGPT refers very little traffic to news publishers’ sites. Rather than chasing clickthroughs, Muncke describes the launch as a fact-finding mission of sorts for The Economist to learn more about ChatGPT users and, more generally, the emerging audience turning to chatbots for news.
“We’re testing the waters,” he told me. “We’re trying to do that in a sensible way that still is connected to the principles of trustworthiness and quality and integrity of The Economist, rather than just move fast and break things. That’s not the business model we’re in.”
