Using audience engagement to report stories

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how the business magazine’s staffers are using audience engagement to report stories.

Dvorkin writes, “For us, good reporting is changing. It’s certainly about gathering information, but it also requires one-on-one engagement with audiences (Peretti says he’s hiring a new breed of reporter who writes stories that “inspire sharing, provoke reactions and elicit discussion”). We have a core group of full-time traditional reporters who grew up in print not knowing their readers. A decade ago, they began to transition to online reporting. Today, they have real-time audience data at their finger tips. That means they understand what’s read and what’s not. On Forbes.com, each reporter is their own brand. They can’t hide behind the big institutional brand, so they are far more accountable for their work and answerable to those who often know more (that is, the audience). We’ve also brought on full-time native digital reporters who started their careers by ‘transacting’ with audiences. Now, they’re learning the ways of print reporting and what it’s like to be questioned by a hard-bitten editor.

“When you add it all up, we have a full-time reporting staff with a collective 550 years of print and digital experience working along side an edit team with probably half that much (some of us don’t like to recall all the years).

“The long-form reportorial successes of our staff reporters continue to add up, largley on the strength of social sharing. Most recently, one of our four billionaires magazine covers was a hit across Twitter and Facebook. FORBES content was the eighth most shared of any publisher across LinkedIn last year.  As I said, friends share the good stuff. By placing our authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience, 17% of our visits came from social sites last month, up from 3% a year earlier.”

Read more here.