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How BusinessWeek measures user engagement

How do you get past those squishy pageview and unique visitor metrics and instead measure how users actually respond to the content you produce? My interview on this topic with BusinessWeek Online editor John Byrne (whom I met in Perugia at the International Journalism Festival a couple weeks ago) is now up on OJR. An excerpt:

Byrne: User engagement is how we nurture and build a community. Our reader engagement index is a comments-to-postings measure for a given month: So we will tally how many comments on X number of stories/blog posts that BusinessWeek.com published that month. This gives us a ratio figure that we track to determine our monthly reader engagement index and growth.

April 16, 2009 | 17:54
Category: News

One Comment

Back in the States, for now

A quick update on the travels and the blogging: I returned to the States earlier this week, after about three months abroad. I have lots of notes and ideas, and now I just have to find the focus to turn them into blog posts. Wish me luck. :-) What's next? I'll be ...
March 26, 2009 | 3:24
Category: News

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Banking law: Holding them accountable

You know that 1999 NYT story that's been floating around on Twitter about the passage of the bill to loosen U.S. banking regulations by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933? It includes some prescient warnings like this one from Sen. Byron Dorgan: "I think we will look back in 10 years' ...
March 19, 2009 | 2:14
Category: Idea file

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‘Spontaneous bashing together of ideas’

That's how BeeBCamp, a BarCamp-style unconference held at the BBC last month, was described on the organization's public blog. My OJR piece on BeeBCamp and "innovation events" in general is up. If your organization has held such an event, please share your experience.
February 25, 2009 | 12:33
Category: Events, Places

6 Comments

Making news pay: no easy answers at Oxford

I attended Andrew Currah's interesting talk on business models for news today at Oxford's Green Templeton College. Currah has just released a report for the Reuters Institute called "What's Happening to Our News." Lots of good insights on the scary economic trends in the U.K. news media. Real problems urgently ...
February 23, 2009 | 16:36
Category: Places

2 Comments

England notes, part 2: Gloomy outlook for newspapers

When I arrived in the U.K., I expected the state of the newspaper industry here to be somewhat less dire than in the U.S. After all, Internet penetration here is still somewhat lower than back home, I figured, so maybe print audiences (and advertisers) haven't dried up as quickly. This list ...