The Economist is enlisting the “collective power of [its] readers” to improve its online resources, and has created “Behind the curtain“, a blog to “give our readers a way to engage in what we build and how we build it, and help to make our idea a better one.”

For a while now at The Economist, we’ve been wrestling with how we can better engage with our readers to develop our website. We’ve had lots of ideas, and acted on a few. We’ve introduced new research initiatives, put up a site feedback form (you can find a link to our form at the top and bottom right of nearly every page of Economist.com), done user testing on new site features and designs and explored all the usual things a business explores to try to understand how it can better serve the needs of its customers. But no amount of earnest study quite delivers what we are looking for. What we really want to do is to strike up a conversation with you. [...]

Our idea is about the collective power of our readers, which is why we feel the need to start this conversation with you. Because the place we want to get to can only be reached if we all share the same idea about where it is we want to go. And no doubt, our idea will change – and change for the better – along the way.