Q&A: Maureen Hoch, Editor of HBR.org
The Idea caught up with Maureen to learn about what Harvard Business Review, which reduced the number of print issues from 10 to 6 last year, is doing digitally.
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The Idea: Can you give us an overview of what you do as editor of HBR.org?
Maureen Hoch: I oversee editorial content on HBR.org, the website for Harvard Business Review. That spans our daily articles which cover management research, work advice, and company stories to our newsletters, video, audio, social media, and then to other digital experiments we might run on the site itself or on new platforms that have growth potential. We get to think about how to help people do their jobs better, to make better decisions, to help their companies run better; it’s really interesting subject matter and we are doing a lot across several different platforms, which makes the job exciting and makes sure there’s always something new to think about.
What is an interesting project you’ve been working on recently? What do you hope to learn?
Something that we’ve been doing this year is working to grow our audio program: We’ve launched two new podcasts in the beginning of this year. One is called Women at Work — it’s a pop-up podcast that digs into the experiences of women in the workplace and talks to researchers and other experts. It’s hosted by a group of three editors — we also had them talk about their experiences and react to the expertise we were bringing into the conversation. We did six episodes of that and got a fantastic response. This was also exciting for me because it’s growing the group of female listeners we have in the podcast space. We’re going into the second season of it, which will come out this fall.
One thing that I learned from it is that when there are chances for HBR to be a part of the conversation — If you can rewind to last fall when everything was starting to expand around the #MeToo movement and stories of sexual harassment around the workplace, we had this moment to stand back and say HBR has been covering women’s leadership and gender research and so many of the aspects about women at work for years, and this is a chance for us to bring that forward and make that useful for people in a timely, relevant way. That connected with the audience very meaningfully, so that was exciting. We also did it really fast, so I was proud of that too.
We also launched another podcast called Dear HBR that comes out twice a month and features two really smart and experienced magazine editors who answer questions from listeners on each episode. They do that with an expert as well. That’s been a nice way to showcase the depth and breadth of the content we have at HBR and it’s a nice cross-platform project for us, in that we have magazine editors hosting a podcast. I would say our work in audio has been really exciting and interesting to watch. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to produce good audio and I’m looking forward to doing more of that and growing that space more in the coming months.
Last year HBR reduced the number of print editions from ten to six, replacing them with six Big Ideas (or a digital manifestation of a magazine issue). We’re interested to hear how that project turned out — how are readers engaging with it? What kind of impact has it had on subscriber conversion?
The Big Idea was launched as an interactive approach to longform features. When we made that change in frequency to the magazine, we wanted to continue to expand our digital content and really listen to what users were saying about how they wanted to engage with ideas online and how authors want to share their ideas. HBR is contributed by outside experts, academics, business leaders, and other people who think about how companies work; we wanted to create an experience that’s exciting for them too.
We have been doing the Big Idea now for more than a year. We’ve covered a lot of really interesting and important topics — everything from AI to loneliness at work to the joint economy. Our most recent Big Idea is an important one: the fight against false news and misinformation online. It was part of this idea that you can go deep on a single issue and give people several different angles to engage with it.
We use email to let readers of the Big Idea know when the next piece has come out and through other ways like social engagement to make sure that audiences are aware of the benefit they get. In terms of impact on subscriptions, I don’t have a lot of hard data to share on Big Idea, but I can say that the program is driving a significant amount of subscriber sign-ins and engagement. We have been working on the right way to frame this to our subscribers; our subscribers are always at the center of how we’re making a lot of these decisions. What we’re deciding to do is actually make most of our archives of Big Idea available only to subscribers; you can imagine we’ve been doing these really in-depth pieces on important issues in business and management and now as a subscriber you’re going to have unique access to explore the archive of some of those pieces and share them with people as it helps you to better explain or use the idea.
[Big Idea] been a really exciting experimental launch; I don’t work on it day-to-day, but it’s been a really important aspect of what we’re doing digitally. We’re continuing to think about the right longform experience online for the kinds of ideas we publish, and the Big Idea has been a huge step forward for that.
HBR seems to be very consumer revenue-driven — a 2016 Nieman Lab article put the revenue split at 75% consumer revenue, 25% advertising. How does that impact your work, if at all, in terms of what digital projects you choose to prioritize?
We put subscribers at the center of what we do here. We have goals to engage our current subscribers and attract new ones as well — increasingly when we’re thinking about new audience growth, that means a younger audience. When we’re thinking about topics we cover, new tools and experiments, new forms of engagement, we’re always trying to think about what kinds of experiences would make sense for subscribers and what are experiences that make sense to attract new people or to just engage a bigger audience.
A few examples of some of the things we’ve done in the subscriber-only space: We have a part of our site called the Visual Library — it’s a library of charts and graphics and PowerPoints and reading guides that are available only to subscribers. That is something that we’re really proud of that serves a purpose for the user. Another thing we’ve been experimenting with in the past few months is subscriber-only video. We’ve done two live video events that were only for subscribers, and we invited them over email. These two particular events took business cases and we invited professors to have a live discussion about a couple of cases. One was on how legacy organizations go digital, another was on whether a company should expand outside of its original business model. On both we saw nice engagement — for us when you’re thinking about subscriber-only projects, it’s really pushing yourself to think about how to get a smaller group of people very, very engaged. Another thing I should mention to follow up on the audio work we’ve been doing: we’re talking about for season 2 of Women at Work to have subscriber-only listener guides. People have reported back to us about season 1 that they wanted to talk about it with coworkers and friends; we would put together some information that would help guide that discussion, and have some extra information and questions for you to think about. Doing something like that and making it a subscriber benefit is something we’re excited to try.
We’re trying to take that big view of ‘we’re making content across all these different platforms that serves these ideas and are interesting and useful’, but we’re trying to think about what are the different parts that could be exciting and engaging for subscribers and help them get even more out of what we’re doing.
You mentioned that HBR is trying to attract a younger audience. Were any of these products designed to appeal to younger readers? For example, I’m wondering if the subscriber-only videos — which used the case method, commonly used in consulting interviews and business schools — saw a younger audience?
I don’t know the age demographics for particularly those subscriber videos. We’ve definitely been thinking about video across several different channels and how we can make video that’s interesting to a younger audience, and, as you experience us more frequently, that some of those subscriber-only videos would become increasingly interesting to you. One thing that was interesting about the subscriber-only videos was that almost half of HBR’s audience is outside the U.S. and we definitely saw a nice representation of people from around the world engaging with it, which gave us more evidence to show that live video is an effective tool for convening people from around the world.
We also continue to do on Facebook Live what we call Whiteboard sessions, which is usually an expert who’s explaining a concept straight to the camera. It’s a learning-focused experience. That’s one where we see a lot of engagement both from people all around the world and with people of all different levels of experiences and of all different levels in their careers, asking questions and trying to better understand these classic concepts in business and how we work. We feel confident that there’s more potential for video to reach younger audiences and we’re probably going to be experimenting more in that space. Like we’ve been ramping up on Instagram lately, doing more Instagram Stories and thinking about video as a form of visual storytelling to help people engage with an idea. We’re going to be doing more of that and thinking about what kinds of content lend themselves the best to either a video or a visual storytelling treatment.
One thing that I think is super interesting in the media industry generally right now is what’s happening with media organizations launching the equivalent of TV shows. Those sorts of channels are going to be really interesting to watch, and we are definitely thinking about how we can best experiment and learn about how we can deliver an experience that is exciting and interesting.
You may have just touched on this, but here’s a question we like to ask all our Subscriber Spotlights: what is the most interesting thing you’ve seen recently from a media company other than your own?
It’s always tough to pick just one thing! I’m definitely watching Pocket with great interest. We’ve seen increasing referral traffic from them in recent months and they seem to be beefing up their editorial curation. There’s something particularly intriguing about knowing what articles people were interested in enough to save. Plus, they’ve built a really great user experience, and I’m always trying to learn from those.
I’m also a fan of a weekly newsletter about tech and the future called The Exponential View, written by Azeem Azhar, who is a former journalist turned strategist and AI expert. (And full disclosure he’s also a member of HBR’s editorial advisory board). He recaps really interesting stuff on everything from AI to blockchain to quantum computing. I always feel smarter after I read it.
A version of this Q&A was published in the July 30th edition of The Idea. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
