The Economist's ugly new print typeface

Turning to the back page of a recent copy of The Economist to read the obituary of Paul Alexander the eye is assaulted by The Economist's new, ugly, hard-to-read typeface (which came about because: "In early 2023, as our font licence was coming up for renewal, we decided that we wanted to create something unique to The Economist.") 

The very first letter of the obituary, the drop capital, seems set adrift from the rest of the word it belongs to and about to slam into a letter on the following line. This really bugs me,

The problems don't stop with drop capitals. Here's a short part of the article The Biden campaign in Michigan has a tremendous ground-game advantage. The W from Wolverine seems to be about snag on the g of campaign.

And here's a little bit of Justin Trudeau is beset by a divided party and an angry electorate. The gg in staggering and the T in The draw the eye to their closeness. The overall effect in this excerpt is that some lines seem closer together than others.

The new typeface makes the print edition of The Economist hard to read. As the eye scans across the page it snags on lines that seem on a collision course. And at the end of a line finding the corresponding next line is harder than before.

These problems do not occur when the new typeface is used online. Something about the line spacing in print makes the new typeface hard to read on paper and easy on screen. Perhaps print doesn't matter any more to The Economist. In the article about the new typeface they say that "Most of our readers subscribe to us digitally".