Testing your Weekly Business News Intelligence

I've been receiving Conde Nast's new business magazine Portfolio for free over the last few months, maybe because I subscribe to WIRED, and have enjoyed reading it. I probably wouldn't pay for a subscription or buy it at the airport news stand but there is some quality news and analysis.

While looking for this 700MHz wireless spectrum infographic that I wanted to include in my earlier post on Walt Mossberg (and not finding it in WIRED), I remembered that it must be in Portfolio since it's the only other hard-copy magazine I read.

It's fine for keeping tabs on the general business economy, regardless of your industry or focus. With that in mind, they have a neat Weekly Intelligence quiz on headlines from the past week's top business stories. Here's the Nov. 26-30 quiz:

I was doing perfect until the question about Richard Branson's new Virgin acquisition and then my score went down the tubes; 50% on my first quiz. This reminds me of the daily, ten-question reading questions I had in 10th grade English class. They were simple (not necessarily easy though) quizzes if you did the reading and paid attention but as my teacher always said, you get a couple 50% or 60% and it takes a lot of 80%,90%, & 100% to raise your average for that quarter.

Now if I were them, I'd allow readers to save their scores and maybe even make a widget letting folks publish/boast about their business news knowledge from their blogs. Would drive traffic to the site and stories and generate some community/feedback as well about their coverage. The online quiz is cool but they need to take it to the next logical step of engaging their readers in a two-way conversation with the quiz.

As Fred puts it, "I don't want to consume media that I can't interact with."

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