To our readers,

We’re extremely proud to announce that the funny little elephant you see at the top of our home page represents our second consecutive win of a National Magazine Award for BusinessWeek.com’s Business Schools channel. It’s exceptionally hard to win an “Ellie,” named after the Alexander Calder stabile elephant, the highest honor in our field. It’s exceptionally rare to win it twice in a row, especially in the same category—Personal Service Online. The award recognizes the Web site with the most creative use of multimedia technology, user involvement, and community tools. And it confirms what we at BusinessWeek.com believe down to our toes: that we have one of the most vibrant and active communities on the Web. In this case, more than 4,500 MBAs and business students who are blogging on our site on some 60,000 discussion forums. Now that’s what I call reader engagement, our single most important priority at BusinessWeek.com.

These two back-to-back wins are the result of a lot of hard work by a remarkably committed and passionate group of journalists: Phil Mintz, Lou Lavelle, Alison Damast, Geoff Gloeckler, Francesca DiMeglio, Alina Dizik, Jane Porter, and Jessica Sanders. Of course, the secret sauce is you and your involvement. Without the active and generous participation of our community, there would be no award. So I also thank all the people who willingly share their knowledge with others to create a special place for anyone interested in business education.

I take a personal delight in announcing this award because I was crazy enough to create our original MBA ranking in 1988 and to launch and build our online B-school community in the mid-1990s. So it’s a special joy to see something I created grow beyond my wildest imagination. Thank you!

Best, John A. Byrne
Editor-in-Chief
BusinessWeek.com