It Takes a Community, Sometimes

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov, 2001 by Jimmy Guterman

4. WATER FREQUENTLY Don't host discussions on the magazine site and ignore them. Discussion groups on The New Yorker's site are hard to find, don't connect well with the articles, and are introduced with half-hearted exhortations that any editor for the venerable print magazine would shoot on sight. Again, if community isn't important, don't bother. Ghost towns and absentee-landlord towns both tend to look ugly. Look at www.fastcompany.com for a Web site that encourages reader interaction and showcases the more intriguing reader contributions.

5. THINK LIKE A READER Different people read different magazines for different reasons. Trade magazines, for the most part, attract readers for the topics they cover, not the personalities who do the covering. Last year, The Industry Standard started discussion groups for each of its regular columnists. None of these groups garnered more than five responses, and eventually they were taken off the Web site. Lesson: Structure online discussion. groups like your readers' minds, not your org chart.