-By John A. Byrne

The most amusing blog post I’ve read this year came from Jeff Jarvis, the BuzzMachine blogger and CUNY J-school prof, who has a reputation as a rebel when it comes to digital journalism.

“Yes, print is a burden,” Jeff wrote recently. “It’s expensive to produce for it. It’s expensive to manufacture. It’s expensive to deliver. It limits your space. It limits your timing. It’s stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each user. It comes with no ability to click for more. It has no search. It can’t be forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. It usually brings unions. And you really should recycle it. Wow, when you think about it, print sucks.”

I don’t have to completely agree with Jeff, but I can certainly appreciate his viewpoint. The media’s analog-to-digital transition has been a monumental struggle for newspapers and magazines. It’s created massive fear in our ranks and has caused a good number of highly talented colleagues to escape our profession. But it’s also been an incredible opportunity to rethink what we do and how we do it. I’m an old print guy, now on the Web side of the business. And I’ve been utterly transformed by the experience. I think of online as the most creative space in our field, where writers and viewers combine to create the new New Journalism.

A core principle of this new New Journalism is reader engagement. Many of us in traditional media are only beginning to understand how to fully engage our users in ways that reinvent our craft. A few months ago, USA Today launched what it called “The Next Generation of Network Journalism.” The idea: to create an entirely new experience for readers by combining home-grown professional journalism, with aggregated content from other media brands, with user-generated content. USA Today editor Ken Paulson explained the changes were being made “for an era in which readers increasingly have the power to monitor many sources of information at once; to more quickly assess the credibility of those sources; and to share their reactions with a wider audience.” The goal: reader engagement.

The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” has created an open-ended space “for debate, dispute, argument and agreement,” inviting users to comment on everything they read. Late last year, the section had up to 10,500 blog posts and an astonishing one million comments. “That scale, as much as anything else, means that the site is no longer completely in control of its content,” explains Georgina Henry, Guardian assistant editor. That’s especially true because reader comments go live without prior approval.

And at BusinessWeek, we’ve launched a series of initiatives to make reader engagement real-regularly running the photographs of readers who substantively add to our journalism, soliciting their ideas for stories, engaging in journalist-to-reader dialogues, and even commissioning essays on core topics by readers who become guest columnists.

Clearly, advertisers benefit from reader engagement, too. The more engaged an audience is with the journalism on a given site, the more likely it is to be engaged with the advertising. This is especially true when the engagement is mindful, rather than mindless. Reading a substantive article on an important topic, thinking about it, and then putting your thoughts and insights down for millions of people to read is clearly the most active and mindful way to consume and interact with media. In this case, the user is not merely expressing an opinion.

He’s contributing to and enlarging the scope of the journalism, creating a conversation with others in the process. He’s discovering like-minded people as well-all over the world-to communicate with.

You can’t measure this by conventional Web metrics. Tracking the effectiveness of a reader engagement initiative requires new metrics. At BusinessWeek, we’re measuring this by counting up our outputs to the world in published stories and blog posts against inputs by our audience-in reader comments and stories. Last September, for every story or blog post on our site, we had roughly 13 contributions from readers. So our Reader Engagement Index was 13-to-1. Soon after the launch of our initiatives to more deeply involve readers, that index rose to 30-to-1. No less important, though, the eyes on those reader contributions and conversations nearly tripled year-over-year.

Beyond the increased numbers, there’s a far more important takeaway. You’re creating context to establish a true community of engaged users. The strategy acknowledges that content is no longer king. No media brand can effectively compete against either search or aggregation with “content.” You can only compete with context. As consultant Jeffrey Rayport puts it, “Content and brand are table stakes. The main game is to engage users directly in authentic, compelling, loyalty-inducing site contexts.”

In the online world, search is the ultimate transaction. It’s the antithesis of community. Context is the ultimate relationship. So welcoming and encouraging readers to be participants in the process of journalism is essential to competing in a media world that has become increasingly transactional. This is the new New Journalism, a model that begins to answer the questions that critics such as Jeff Jarvis has raised about our business. If print sucks, this new New Journalism is a beautiful thing.   

John A. Byrne is the executive editor of BusinessWeek and editor in chief of BusinessWeek.com. He can be reached at john_byrne@businessweek.com.