Hasta La Creative!

Media Shift’s Mark Glaser spoke to BusinessWeek executive editor, John Byrne, about sweeping usability changes to the venerable magazine’s website.

In response to a question about upping participation from the user base, or community, Byrne says:

We have had a very rigourous, very lively reader involvement on the site for a long time. In any given month, roughly 15,000 people participate in conversations on our site, but they are largely hidden from view. You have to either go into a blog and see how people are responding, or you have to go into a forum to see how people are exchanging views, or go to the end of a story to see the comments on it. We want to elevate those conversations and make them more apparent to everyone that these conversations are occuring.

We are rewarding our readers for making thoughtful comments on our site by going to the reader and saying, “We like what you’re saying and want to feature it in a prominent way, can you send us a digital picture of yourself so we can put it on the home page.”

This is about elevating our conversation and giving credence to the rhetoric that everyone has, that the web is a dialogue and not a lecture. The truth is that very few people are delivering on it, having reporters actively engage with readers or elevating comments and saying, “This is as important as any story we have, any video we have, any audio we have.”