The brief for this session was to talk about the ways in which our community influences our editorial. In this respect, Community development at The Economist is both an incredible opportunity and something of a challenge. It’s an opportunity because of our extraordinary audience. They are experienced, insightful and intellectually curious, and it’s a true pleasure to be able to work with them. t’s a challenge because what The Economist does is a little different from what the daily newspapers, and the broadcasters, supply. Rather than breaking news, we provide weekly high level analysis into which it’s a bit trickier to feed direct reader input. People still look to us, for now, as a source of authority – perhaps even as an antidote to social media, or as a counterweight. I hope, over the next few minutes, to lead you through a handful of examples of how we’re increasing opportunities foe readers to participate in what we produce – some extremely simple, some a little more complex, all of which I hope might inspire in one way or another. There are three ways in which we are harnessing that power, at least from an editorial perspective. There are the ways in which they influence our weekly printed magazine; There are the numerous community features in which we invite them to participate online And there are the more general ways in which we’re encouraging them to create editorial content for each other. I’d like to talk about each of these in turn.
To start at the beginning, I can think of three fairly simple ways in which our readers directly influence our printed magazine. Our caption competition will not win us any prizes, but its successful enough to be worth bringing up. We are famous for the wry captions that appear alongside photos in the magazine – every fortnight we allow our readers to produce one themselves. We get some really excellent suggestions. When we used this picture to illustrate a corporate war raging between Parmalat, an Italian yoghurt maker and Lactalis, a French dairy firm, our readers came up with the caption…
When banner ads bearing Jimmy Wales’s puppy dog face raised several million dollars for the wikimedia foundation, our readers came up with the caption:
Unlike many caption competitions elsewhere, whe winner gets their printed in all of our 1.6m copies. We commonly find something to use as a headline as well. That’s the simplest of all community inititiatives…
… recently the Big Mac index, has given us an opportunity to try something a bit more ambitious. Illustrated here, by the World’s scariest clown, the Big Mac index is an annual feature that compares differences in the price of burgers around the world to find out which currencies are over or under-valued. We largely take Macdonald’s own word as to what prices they charge where. But last year we were able to get a more comprehensive view of big mac prices by inviting readers to collect the data on our behalf. They marched into chains in Lithuania, Indonesia, El Salvador, Venezuela and many more places besides. This went down so well that we invited readers amused by the big mac index to suggest their own economic indicators – and then wrote a column featuring the best of them. There were many weird and wonderful ideas - the best suggestion was to track google searches for the term “gold price”. When we looked back at the period 2004-2011, we did indeed see that searches rose as consumer confidence fell.
And thirdly, our readers presence is commonly felt within our magazine, from their impressive and unnerving capacity to find errors in what we produce. On our website we now publish a monthly round up of all the corrections we’ve made – many of which have initially been spotted by our commenters. In March, members of our community noted that this post itself included an error. We’d like to claim that this was subtle use of irony, but we’re not really that smart. Economist readers helpfully correct other news sources as well: one of our community members spotted that a recent article in Metro referred as fact to a story we had published on April Fool’s Day – an article we’d concocted about some purely fictional manufacturing technologies would soon allow you to print your own pets .
If readers have some influence over the magazine, it’s on our website that they find spaces, dedicated to them. Over the last year or so we’ve made it our mission to produce the kinds of online events that rely, almost entirely, on their input. In doing this we’ve tried to build things that take advantage of our strengths – consider “What the world thinks” which capitalises on the international nature of our audience. What the World thinks asks readers around the world the same question, publishes their responses, and marks their opinions on our world map to compare differences across countries and regions. We’ve asked questions like: Do you believe in nuclear power? Should outsiders intervene in Syria, and here, “Would Mitt Romney make a good president of the United States?” The yellow indicates a general sense of ambivalence, except, oddly enough, for a handful of voters over there in North Korea, where the Green indicates a definite “yes”. This suggests that there’s a lot of potential in future to use all manner of data to help create more structured, more interesting and more insightful types of online discussions.
Just as we’re lucky to have readers around the world, we’re also fortunate to have built very large audience on social media sites – we have around 1m followers on Facebook, and about 2.5m in total on Twitter. One of our community features, Ask The Economist, is an early attempt at giving these audiences more Economist of their own. These are hour long discussion events, moderated by an Economist journalist, run on Twitter and embedded on our website. Our journalists normally write without bylines, but for these events they step out from behind the curtain, and record a 1 minute video trailer, which we seed onto social networks a few days before the event, inviting our followers to take part. We gain the amplication effects of plugging into a large social network, but because we also anchor it on our site we make it easy for our traditional audiences to find it, and feature advertising along side it.
Perhaps the most sophisticated, and weightiest, of the ways we harness the smartness of our reader community is through our online debates. These are two-week long online discussions. We select a motion, an Economist journalist to moderate and two expert guests – one to propose, one to oppose. The guests deliver three statements (an opening, a rebuttal and a conclusion) and throughout the event readers pose their questions, and make their own statements – to which our guests regularly respond. And we choose big, meaty motions to debate. We’ve just concluded “ This house believes that untouched wildernesses have a value beyond the resources and other utility that can be extracted from them . “ This house believes that new measures of economic and social wellbeing are necessary for the 21st century economy” “ This house believes that the loss of privacy from digitising health care will be more than compensated for by the benefits of increased efficiency.” Not the kind of thing that you might expect to see flying around facebook. And yet these debates work, and work well. Popular with readers and popular with sponsors, who want to feel like they’re nurturing high-level discussion.
We’re now expanding their life by spinning out other editorial features from them. At the close of each debate we produce a video which sums up its most salient points, and the best contributions from our readers. We publish it on our own site, and circulate it on social media.
Finally, while I hope these have been interesting examples of some of our more novel community experiments, I’d like to talk more about our efforts to increase the level of discussion, generally, on our site. Before Christmas we put a bit of development work into our community platform. We drastically shortened the registration process. We started auto-generating user names for readers who didn’t want to bother selecting their own. We introduced threaded comments, allowing readers to reply to each other. Within a few months the volume of comments on our site was up by about 80%, the number of people participating had nearly doubled. These were delightful results, and just go to prove how very simple changes can have a big impact. But the most pleasant surprise for, me, was that one month after launching a reply button, 40% of the comments on our website were replies from one reader, to another. We should all embrace the opportunity to improve our journalism through the input of our readers. But I think the best news sites will get ever more like the best conferences. News sites have articles, conferences have presentations. News sites have comment threads, conferences have Q+A sessions. But where many people get the most benefit from the conference world is in the networking, the conversations over coffee, the drinks after the event. Connecting readers with each other, empowering them to start their own debates and discuss topics of their own interest is something that news sites have ever done very well. But the idea that in the future readers might pay to join that network, as much as to read our journalism is a powerful one, and one that we’d like to explore in the year or two ahead.
