Web-first and user-first strategies find success. And inspiration here from many sources: a major collaboration, thoughts on thriving in news, and a conversation on journalism and democracy.

Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value
Surfacing meaningful metrics to show impact, social media measurement requires a different lens. “Did you grab attention? Did you deliver delight?”

Why the future of business media is not in print, it’s in being user-first
An approach to financial sustainability putting users front and center. Author Neil Thackray sums it up: An approach that “creates deep engagement across platforms is always monetisable.”

Data and visualization blogs worth following
Interested in how people are using data to understand ourselves better? Stay current and fuel your work with this collection of inspiring blogs covering data visualization.

Christian Science Monitor sees traffic, revenue rising after 3 years of Web-first strategy
Digital first case study: Christian Science Monitor ups views, uniques, ad revenue and content sales after “wrenching” change adapting “serious…journalism to the Web’s possibilities.”

Inside Forbes: The 9 Key Steps We’ve Taken to Disrupt the Traditional News Business
Nine practices a “95-year-old startup” cultivates to reinvent itself. Forbes writer Lewis DVorkin writes “we’re striving to create a news experience that is not just social, but connected.”

A lesson in collaboration: How 15 news orgs worked together to tell a single education story
A collaboration case study: Fifteen reporters and more than a dozen news organizations together “track the local use of $3 billion in federal School Improvement Grant stimulus money.”

5 ways young journalists can stay motivated, thrive in the newsroom
Via Poynter, Tom Huang’s perspective on thriving in journalism. A response to Malcolm Gladwell’s suggestion young people avoid print newsrooms and “go the penniless web route for practice.”

Marty Kaplan on Big Money’s Effect on Big Media
Head of USC’s Norman Lear Center Marty Kaplan talks with Bill Moyers, noting “Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and make democracy work.”