/Interview/ Q&A: Ben Edwards
11/12/2008 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Ben Edwards discusses how Economist.com is bringing its readers together for global discussion and debate online
.net: What were your main considerations when you started changing economist.com last year?
Our strategy is to build a place for global, intelligent discussion and debate between our journalists, our readers and our guests. To be successful at this, we must put together the right technologies, the right design, the right readers and the right thought about what our editors do to catalyse and host this intelligent conversation.
.net: What were (and still are) the main challenges in redesigning the site?
BE: The main challenge is to innovate on a legacy platform with a legacy design while simultaneously building a new site on a new set of technologies. This is very difficult to achieve. But we cannot duck the challenge. The web is always changing, and to meet our readers’ expectations of change, we must constantly change too.
.net: How do you address criticism that the redesigned homepage is too cluttered and columns shouldn’t be below the fold?
BE: If you decide to have a fold, something has to go below it. When people complain to me that the columns are below the fold, or that multimedia is below the fold, I point out that the publisher’s promotional spot, which we call “Product & Events”, is right at the bottom of the page. I agree with you that the homepage remains too cluttered. But we have made good progress from the prior design. Our next design will be even cleaner, simpler and easier to use.
.net: How popular are the online debates?
BE: Our online debates are the finest distillation we have so far of our strategy of building a place for global discussion and debate. They bring together all four elements we are looking for: a set of social-computing technologies, an innovative design, tens of thousands of readers from all over the world who want to engage in rational, intelligent conversation, and editorial moderators and guest speakers to frame and guide the discussion. There is nothing else like them on the web - for the global nature of the conversation, or for the quality and intelligence of the reader contributions to an open, public forum. And our readers are truly prolific: they generate about a novel’s worth of content inside a week of debating. Our next challenge is to create a daily version of debate, which takes the best qualities of our online debates and makes the format readily accessible to a broad, time-poor audience.
.net: Why have you chosen Pluck to deploy social media?
BE: Pluck was an attractive option for us because it provided us with a way to integrate social computing with our legacy content management system quickly and cost-effectively. We were up and running in two months or so, start to finish, with no major rebuild needed.
As we invest in our strategy, we are now bringing this social functionality into the core of our platform. This way, we can provide our readers with a differentiated brand experience as they publish to the site, manage their identities and their reputations on Economist.com and connect with our journalists, our guests and each other. So we are swapping out Pluck for open source content and community-management system Drupal, which will give us more control over the development of social functionality on Economist.com. Drupal is lightweight, flexible, highly extensible and very cost effective and will be a great strength for us going forward, especially as our competitors struggle with their costly, monolithic, bespoke, closed publishing platforms.
.net: What are your plans for economist.com now?
BE: Next year will be one of rapid change for us at Economist.com. By the end of it, I hope we will have created something powerful, unique and authentic. Newspaper and magazine sites seem to all look the same and offer the same thing – articles, multimedia, comments, data. Competition is brutal and readers use sites interchangeably. This is certainly not true of The Economist in print, and will not be true for The Economist online either. We have made a good start in building a place where people can come to have global, intelligent discussion and debate. If we finish the job (and there is a long way to go), it really will differentiate us – and in a way that is true to our brand and our mission. But first, we need to muster the courage to go and complete the job.
Ben Edwards
Job title Publisher, Economist.com, and vice president, The Economist Group
Age 38
Education Degrees in English from Oxford University and Economics from the University of London
Previous career Director of New Media Communications at IBM; finance reporter, Tokyo bureau chief and American business editor at The Economist
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