News coming fast and furious

Tonya Garcia of PRWeek interviews John Byrne, who runs BusinessWeek‘s online operations, about what it’s been like covering Wall Street during the economic turmoil and the importance of the Web to covering the story.

Here is an excerpt:

PRWeek: What has your job been like for the past month or so given all the turmoil on Wall Street?

John Byrne: It’s been frantic. The news has been coming fast and furious and the need to get speedy analysis on all the developments on both the economy and the collapse of the financial markets has made everyone extremely busy, working really long hours. But it’s been an exciting time to be in the news business. What every journalist yearns for is when the news is really important and it is being read by a lot of people. All of these developments in the world of business are creating record traffic for us as well. In September, we broke the 10 million-plus unique visitors number for the first time, 10.1 million. The reach of the Web site is now more than twice as large as the magazine’s audience. We had one of our highest number of page views ever recorded for that month as well.

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PRWeek: Since you work on both the Web site and the magazine, can you talk about how important the Web site is, particularly in this situation?

Byrne: Here we are in a world where you can get access to news and even analysis instantly. The whole concept of the weekly magazine is completely different. In the magazine, we’re doing total original content, less related in many ways to news than had been the province of a newsweekly in the past. Online gives us the opportunity to compete almost like a newswire, or a broadcast, or a daily newspaper.

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Read more here.