Poets & Quants founder Byrne steps away

John Byrne, the business journalist who founded Poets & Quants to cover business schools, is stepping away after 16 years.

Managing editor Marc Ethier interviewed him. Here is an excerpt:

What was the best decision you made at Poets&Quants?

It had to be just to launch it. I had been thinking about this for quite some time. I saw the potential of it while I was at Businessweek, and I knew that there was an audience out there waiting for something like Poets&Quants.

Part of that came from the success we had at Businessweek with the community we built online. One of the stats that really made the light bulb go off was that the average visitor to Businessweek did only about 1.8 page views per month. But those who went to the business school area of the site did something like 52 pages a month.

So I knew there was great potential to create a community and serve that audience. Traditional media has two problems. One is that journalists tend to write what they want to write, not necessarily what the audience wants or needs. The other is cost – when you advertise in traditional media, you’re paying for a lot of audience you don’t really want.

I knew that if I could attract the audience advertisers actually wanted, we could undercut traditional media and still build a strong business. If anything, my only regret is that I didn’t start earlier.

Read more here.