Fortune’s new web head wants to improve user experience

Since launching nearly a year ago, Fortune’s website has become the No. 11 site among business and financial news sites with 13.8 million unique visitors in March.

It’s Mark Gongloff‘s job to keep that growth going. Gongloff starts Monday as Fortune’s digital editor, replacing Deborah Caldwell.

Fortune’s web operations, and its technology coverage, have been boosted this year by the hiring of six GigaOm journalists earlier this year. Fortune’s web operation now has an editorial staff of 40 editors, writers, videographers and graphic designers, but Gongloff said it would continue to look for opportunities to grow.

“We clearly are on the lookout for the right opportunities,” said Gongloff in a telephone  interview Thursday with Talking Biz News.

Gongloff, who recently had been managing editor for business and technology at The Huffington Post, praised the work of Caldwell and magazine editor Alan Murray for launching the website in June after the magazine had spent a decade posting its content in CNNMoney’s site. He said his job is to continue finding new ways to expand Fortune’s audience.

“I’m sort of continuing the work that they have already done, which is taking the brilliant journalism that Fortune does and keep making it a bigger part of the conversation,” said Gongloff. “It’s keep building the audience and finding new ways to reach new audiences. Increasingly, you have to go and find the audience on mobile and new apps. We’re going to keep looking for new avenues to spread the work of the incredible work that Fortune’s journalists are doing.”

Part of that work will be improving the user experience and exploring new ways of telling stories.

“We want to keep working on ways to improve the user experience on mobile and any other platform,” said Gongloff. “We want to make it more responsive and take the product forward.

“The people that are there are superstars and are doing great journalism. I don’t foresee having them doing anything different necessarily. But we are going to look for new ways to tell stories, with digital, with video, on different platforms, as a way to try to reach a broader audience and an audience in bigger numbers without changing the DNA of the existing Fortune brand, the serious and good journalism that people have always done there.”

Gongloff was head of markets coverage at WSJ.com in 2007 and was part of a team that built an interactive mortgage-crisis explainer that was a finalist for a Scripps-Howard award for Web reporting. As the WSJ’s “Ahead Of The Tape” columnist for two years at the heart of the financial crisis, he made a prescient call in March 2009 that the stock market was due for a rebound.