After 10 years of focusing on education technology, e.Republic's Converge broadened its mission this year, starting with the January issue, to address a longer list of critical issues facing education, including effective literacy programs, green and vibrant schools, and 21st century skills and careers.

The companion Web site, relaunched April 1, was the first to use e.Republic's new Clickability content management system, which puts more control in the hands of editors than IT. The system powers Web 2.0 tools such as blogging, commenting and automatically generated lists of most popular and e-mailed stories.

The site now features significantly more staff-written original content, said Marina Leight, editor in chief. Prior to the relaunch, 20 new articles were posted monthly; since then, it's been 60. Seven new bloggers collectively generate 30 posts per month, where there were no blogs previously. As a result, monthly page views for the three months after the relaunch were 32% higher than the three months before. Monthly unique visitors soared from 7,000 to 13,000 between June 2008 and June 2009.

One of the goals of the Web site redesign was providing a visual upgrade. "On the old site, we would have one image for every 10 or 20 articles. Now it's about nine out of 10," said Zach Presnall, e.Republic's Web marketing manager. "We wanted the site to match the look of the magazine in terms of images, fonts and color."