BusinessWeek.com chief: We need to think more about our audience
May 27, 2008 · · 1 Comment
John Byrne, the executive editor of BusinessWeek and the editor in chief of BusinessWeek.com, says the site is increasing using readers to inform their reporting and writing of stories.
A little over a month ago, I started a blog called “What’s Your Story Idea?” in which we actively ask our readers for their story suggestions. I’ve now assigned about six ideas to journalists and the first of these will debut this week. We’ll fully credit the reader for the idea, with his or her picture and a small bio. And we’re using this feature to essentially invite the reader into our newsroom. For the “Recession in America” series, for example, I’m asking readers where we should send our reporter and who he should interview. Some of the suggestions are fantastic.
But this is just a start. Increasingly, we’re having readers inform our reporting and writing of stories in all sorts of ways. Take this week’s cover, “Beyond Blogs.” Writers Steve Baker and Heather Green started their reporting process online months ago by asking readers what needed updating in their still popular 2005 cover “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” As recommendations from readers came in on their Blogspotting blog, Steve and Heather annotated (with highlighted links) the online version of the original story so that users could see both what it used to say and what it now should say. The online story, with all those pop-up footnotes, became an incredible read in itself. And when Steve recently did a story on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, he began writing topic sentences for his article on Twitter and asked users to fill in the rest of the paragraphs. Now that’s audience-centric.
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[...] This, he said, was audience-centric storytelling. [...]