For a while now at The Economist, we’ve been wrestling with how we can better engage with our readers to develop our website. We’ve had lots of ideas, and acted on a few. We’ve introduced new research initiatives, put up a site feedback form (you can find a link to our form at the top and bottom right of nearly every page of Economist.com), done user testing on new site features and designs and explored all the usual things a business explores to try to understand how it can better serve the needs of its customers. But no amount of earnest study quite delivers what we are looking for. What we really want to do is to strike up a conversation with you.
We have an idea about the place we want to build online. We think it’s a very exciting and powerful idea. It’s also a very different idea to the idea we have now about our website, and what it is for. Even though it’s different, however, we think it’s an idea that’s worthy of our mission statement, which we print in every weekly edition of The Economist:
To take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.
In fact, we think that our idea is not only worthy of our mission but the answer to how to go about accomplishing it in the modern world, with modern publishing technology. (As true contrarians, however, we continue to believe strongly in the future of our weekly printed newspaper.)
So far, it’s mostly just an idea. To build the place we want to build, we will need new technology, a new design, new products, new features, new marketing and communications initiatives and a fair amount of innovation. But most of all, we will need you.
It’s a wonderful privilege to work at The Economist because we have such a unique set of readers. Global, open-minded, intellectually curious, passionate about ideas and keenly aware of their power to shape the world, our readers are unique – as individuals, in groups, but most powerfully, collectively.
Our idea is about the collective power of our readers, which is why we feel the need to start this conversation with you. Because the place we want to get to can only be reached if we all share the same idea about where it is we want to go. And no doubt, our idea will change – and change for the better – along the way.
In the meantime, here’s to the journey, and to the exploration in getting there.The Economist online team
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13 comments:
Congratulations on your (potentially) good idea. Just be very careful about how you go about it. Listening to a lot of voices can broaden perspective and heighten the chances of encountering unique and innovative ideas. But it is essentially a brute-force approach, and as such always runs the risk of becoming noisy, inefficient and tedious.
I have read The Economist for the past ten years for its superior clarity and coherency - it is these traits that I view as defining. I hope you will always be cognizant of the impact of any changes on them. Not to say that you should not pursue change, of course - changing things risks making them worse, but changing nothing guarantees obsolescence.
You walk a fine line and face high expectations!
Quite apart from planning for the future, how about having a talk to your editor about running a piece on the CHRC vs Mark Steyn case currently running in Vancouver? In this Economist reader's humble opinion, it is by far the most important single issue facing the English-speaking democracies today. Free speech in Australia, Britain and the U.S. is threatened by home-grown bureaucracies on growth hormone, progressively strangling freedom of speech in the name of human rights. In Canada, the CHRC in its misguided zealotry appears to have even engaged in illegal activities against innocent citizens. Some discussion please, before the disease spreads to the U.K. and the Economist, too, receives a gag order.
I think it is important to first point out that The Economist has in fact already done a decent job of moving towards this goal, at least in relative terms versus other quality news sites such as the WSJ. The ability to directly comment on any article, in addition to the blogs, is at least a first step. One thing that has occurred to me in using and reading these features, however, is that I feel sometimes it would be interesting to have more frequent responses to reader postings from The Economist. At the moment, such responses after the initial posting / article seem to be quite sparing (with some notable exceptions), even when very interesting counter-points to an article / blog are brought up by readers.
One more concrete idea that I have: I wonder if it is practical to create some sort of "summary" of this conversation The Economist wants to have with its readers - I have long consumed nearly all of the content produced by The Economist, but as its readers have begun to contribute more to the generation of content, it has become rather more difficult to do this. While I am highly interested not only in The Economist's thoughts, but also in the intellectual thoughts of other reasonable and informed persons, it is often impractical to actually read all of these thoughts. Some form of recap would be greatly welcome.
Beyond that, I wish you luck in the pursuit of this goal. Despite being young and somewhat of an amateur technology enthusiast, I often struggle to find the most relevant and efficient ways to integrate the newest technologies into both my personal and my professional life. Blogs, for example, while all the rage for quite some time now, have seemed so numerous and of (in general, although again with many notable exceptions) such poor quality as to be rather useless to my efforts to remain up-to-date with current events. What The Economist brings to this is essentially the same as what it brings to weekly news publications: a trusted source of a high caliber, intellectually sound content covering an array of current topics. If this can be further developed, in a manner that is both easy and efficient to use, to better harness the collective insights of not only The Economist's staff but also its readers, I am sure it will be powerful indeed.
A less related thought: it seems a bit odd to suddenly choose to use Blogger to discuss changes to The Economist online, when The Economist already has its own separate blogs directly on the website. Doesn't this just make it less convenient to find?
This is a very smart approach. All I'm sure of is that this is a tough job I don't know how to do.
I think for now my main suggestion is to match your language to the environment. I often read sections online that imply a link I can't find. I suspect some transitive verbs have different meanings online. In a newspaper sentences beginning "we find" or "we offer" almost always refer to the rest of the sentence or the following paragraph or article. Those words online generally imply a link. I don't know how to do it, but taking care with both hierarchies of information and online languages might make the dialogue more fluent.
Some other topical websites such as OpenCongress and Beliefnet allow members to set up their own pages to continue dialogue. I have to admit I don't get or use those pages (or Facebook or Myspace) but there may be virtues to that mode since it seems to be happening a lot.
I certainly recommend continuing to flatter your readers. As we will continue to flatter you.
Another thought: I remember hearing from another frequent commenter on your blogs that he thought his comments were being removed. I think that for "the severe contest" to take place, the normal process of posting rules and deleting offenders isn't sufficient to encourage frankness from people with unusual perspectives. To avoid reflexive assumptions of political bias, it might be better to notify those whose comments are being removed with an encouragement to rephrase. Obviously, this would be heavy lifting if you were removing very many comments but assuming these are small numbers, this is a way of inviting odd and unusual opinions into the public square without tolerating personal or hateful language.
Many thanks for your comments.
Andrei, the way we think about this is we want to innovate in the way we deliver our journalism (distribution, syndication, presentation, device, interactivity, portability), but not the journalism itself, which we think is strong and distinctive and does not require change.
chrisbartels, we are thinking about innovating in formats for capturing and publishing summaries of conversations and debates for more efficient and effective storage, navigation and consumption. One site that has caught our attention is www.idebate.org, which uses wikis to provide a logical navigation for collective debate. This has the advantage of making the archived document itself interactive and evolutionary in nature. Perhaps you have some ideas here?
Doug, your point regards moderation is very well taken. We are just beginning to think about how we moderate at scale (we had over 15,000 comments to our site in May) in ways that help promote the severe contest. Perhaps we need to create a set of standard emails, depending on the infraction, that we send to our readers reminding them of our site rules and encouraging them to repost within the rules. I am sure we will be returning to this topic on this blog many times in coming months.
I have been a reader of the print edition for over 20 years and have relied on it for high quality well written and critical reporting and excellent editorial viewpoints. It is my principal source of news analysis, and frequently when a hot topic comes up on the broadcast media I find myself waiting to see what the Economist viewpoint is. Since I now live in a rural area Italy, and my print edition is normally a few days late, over the years I have started to use the on-line edition on a more frequent basis, especially recently with the comments feature which does introduce an exciting new element. As much as I love curling up for a siesta with the print edition, I now find myself going on-line on Fridays.
However there is still work to be done in improving. As others have pointed out, the comments pages sometime do get out of hand and I refer in particular to any recent article to do with the subject of China, where it appears angry blogsters have latched on to the Economist to vent their rage at western media and viewpoints. These comments are evolving into shouting matches which digress far from the original subject, fascinating and interesting at times, but I think inappropriate for regular readers and subscribers who want to say something. At one time the Economist on-line was restrictive about which articles could be viewed by non-subscribers. Now it appears that there are no restrictions, and I more one am finding it harder to justify my subscription, especially when I am being flamed for my comments by non-subscribers who appear fanatic about justifying their cause without bothering to listen to another point of view.
I do like and enjoy the comments section, but some method of control is needed. Since I assume that the economist is still primarily a print newspaper and the on-line edition is an enhanced form for the benefit of readers I think that restrictions should be put on which articles and features can be used by non-subscribers. I don’t advocate banning non-subscribers from commenting, but I think they should be restricted to one comment each, and only subscribers be allowed multiple comments.
It is important that the Economist expands to meet the requirements of our new digital information age, but not to lose that special feeling it once had, a sort of dignified club for like-minded members and please try to maintain a little sense of exclusiveness.
Ben, I think I left 13,000 of those. I wonder about the 80/20 rule here. You have a mechanism in place to report questionable comments which is probably a good way to zero in on troublesome comments. As long as that number is small, it might be better for staff to interact with problematic commenters.
I'm curious how many comments were deleted last month. Based on the debate hall, I'd think you've given fairly wide latitude. That's laudable, and crucial to your goal, but raises its own problem- that those people who find their comments deleted may be twice distressed, the second injury being comparisons to some fairly invective comments that are left in place.
Like Chris Bartels, above, I'm curious why this conversation is happening via blogger.
Doug,
Let me see if I can get a number for deleted comments. I can tell you it's small, but perhaps we are tracking the actual number. In general, our editorial staff set a liberal policy towards moderation.
Regards this conversation, due to the somewhat experimental nature of this blog, we thought it best to launch this blog off domain, at least to start with.
Apologies for the additional work for you to post to it.
Ben, its no trouble for me as I use blogger every day. I was only curious at the thinking. As far as getting me a number, I wasn't trying to hold your feet to the fire. I see this space as a gentle dialogue in support of a severe contest elsewhere and at another time. My suggestion is just that the process for moderation is probably as important to your goal as the on-screen environment and my guess is that a critical element of the moderation will be how you deal with perceived bad actors.
Ah, and just a note about using blogger. When a new comment comes in from someone with a blogger ID, the email notification comes with the commenter's email address as the "reply to" address. The reason this matters is that an automatic out-of-office reply goes to the commenter. To the extent that you would like to keep individuals' direct contact info out of the hands of strangers, it might be best to create a new address to receive the notifications.
If you want to encourage comments, you might consider offering a small "Economist Blogger of the Year" award around the time of your Christmas edition.
I seem to recall that some of your other Christmas competitions offer a pen or an Economist publication.
Of course, the incentive would not be the prize itself, but the prestige of being recognized.
An Anonymous Commentator
Will this (blog site?) have the name Economist.com associated with it in any direct way? Or will this discussion be hosted on a new url without the name economist.com? Could the best pieces find their way on a new mostly reader-written site and you share part any revenue ad with authors of selected posts?
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