Ben LaMothe of Econsultancy interviewed BusinessWeek.com editor in chief John Byrne about the business magazine’s philosophy when it comes to online journalism.
Here is an excerpt:
What is BusinessWeek’s approach to the web?
We have one overriding goal: to have the deepest and most meaningful engagement with our audience than any other business site in the world. It’s an incredibly ambitious objective because we have set the bar high for our definition of engagement. Most other online properties define engagement as a metric. For them, it’s simply time spent on the site or pages viewed per monthly unique. We see engagement as core to what we do and how we do it.
It’s partly our willingness and our desire to collaborate with our audience, and it’s partly our ability to encourage that collaboration so you’re getting far more than world class business journalism when you come to BusinessWeek.com.Â
Let me give some context here. Journalism, by and large, has been a product produced by writers and editors and delivered to an audience. That was fine when there was no technology to allow journalists to engage in an ongoing dialogue with readers and to allow for true collaboration between the writers and the readers.
What journalism needs to become is this digital age is a process that embraces and involves your audience at every level, from idea generation to reporting and sourcing and finally to the publication of the article when the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic.Â
If done well, that conversation, orchestrated by the writer or editor of the article, has as much or more value to a reader as the journalism itself.Â
Read more here.
