I’ve been tinkering with some new metrics I’ve installed on the site, getting a better picture of who our audience is.

We don’t use focus groups at TCB, push against industry trends and generally buck the commercial mentality that permeates today’s news media. We rely on an older, more pure form of editorial control : We listen to pitches; we evaluate trends; we consider not only what people on the street are talking about, but what they should be talking about. Content drives advertising, never the other way around.

So it’s fascinating to me to see who picks up on the vibe we’re putting out.

We skew female, which was surprising to me because the gender balance among our staff is way off. And our African-American readership is way higher than the national average, though still not truly representative of the demographic in our market.

I always suspected that our audience had more education than other publications, which was confirmed by a round of analytics from Quantcast. Fully 75 percent of our readers have gone to college, and 25 percent of them continued on to graduate education.

Even more gratifying was the political activity index. Almost 80 percent of our readers are politically active.

I’ve got lots more data to sift through, but I just wanted to let our readers know how awesome they are.

Thanks, all.

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