Tag Archives: Forbes
Flint of Forbes, dean of auto writers, dies at 79
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Jerry Flint, who has covered the auto industry since 1958 and who had been at Forbes since 1979, died Saturday from a stroke at the age of 79. He had won a Loeb Award in 2003.
His son, Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Flint, writes on Forbes.com, “After serving in the Army for three years in a European intelligence unit, he joined The Wall Street Journal as a staff writer where he spent 11 years covering business and finance.
“In 1967 Flint moved to The New York Times as its Detroit bureau chief. Not only did he continue to focus on the automotive industry, he also reported on the 1967 Detroit riots and the 1968 presidential campaign.
“Flint moved to New York in 1973, working as The New York Times’ chief labor reporter, assistant to the national editor and assistant to the financial editor.
“He joined Forbes in 1979 as its Washington bureau chief. He ran the D.C. bureau for Forbes for four years before returning to New York and Forbes headquarters where he held several senior positions including assistant managing editor and senior writer. While he officially retired from Forbes in 1996, he continued on as a columnist until his death. His last column ‘Why Car Prices Are Climbing’ ran Aug. 2. He was also a contributor to Ward’s AutoWorld.”
Read more here.
The radical reinvention of Forbes
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Matthew Flamm of Crain’s New York Business writes Sunday about the dramatic changes occurring at Forbes magazine.
Flamm writes, “According to a 19-page presentation that was distributed to advertisers and obtained by Crain’s, Mr. D’Vorkin will turn Forbes into a digital-age print property with a ‘web-compatible aesthetic’ and a rededicated focus on long-form journalism. Forbes.com will put news at the center of social media conversations and foster ‘participatory story-building’ to bring users and other journalists into the discussion.
“In a departure from the traditional separation of church and state in print journalism, an ‘AdVoice’ platform will allow marketers to supply content to both the magazine and website.
“Most significantly, Mr. D’Vorkin, a former AOL executive who has also been an editor at Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, will field an army of bloggers from existing staff and new contributors. They will publish and promote themselves using tools developed at web journalism startup True/Slant, which he founded and ran until Forbes bought it in May. He certainly has experience creating winning web businesses. At AOL, he helped to launch TMZ, the wildly popular gossip site.
“For Forbes staffers, this brave new world of entrepreneurial journalism has inspired excitement—and fear. ‘It’s going to be a sink-or-swim Darwinian experience,’ says one writer turned blogger.”
Read more here.
Forbes' blogging strategy could dilute brand
by Chris Roush
Lauren Kirchner of Columbia Journalism Review is worried about what Forbes‘ new strategy where every writer will have a blog will mean to the business magazine.
Kirchner writes, “But it’s unclear whether these models will work with Forbes.com’s particular audience. (It’s the exact opposite of the Economist style, where the pieces are all written in a consistent voice and its writers don’t even get bylines.) The casual, individualized tone of a True/Slant blog won’t necessarily translate to a staid Forbes story about oil markets, for instance. So what reason will Forbes.com readers have to ‘follow’ or ‘friend’ (or whatever) a particular reporter over another? Perhaps readers will be ‘fans’ of particular beats, rather than reading columnists for their unique writing styles.
“Another important difference, though, between the original True/Slant experiment and this new iteration of Forbes.com is that True/Slant was a completely blank slate, but Forbes is a well established news institution. Forbes is already its own brand, already has a readership, and that readership has certain expectations.
“The danger of an ‘everyone blogs’ edict is that it might dilute that brand, which can play out in at least two ways. One, reporters may find themselves distracted by the hungry beast of the blog and less able to report and write the other, longer stories they had previously devoted their time to. If the quality of the writing goes down, that can counteract the benefits presumed by an uptick in the quantity of the writing. Two, the aforementioned combination of ‘thousands [of] freelance contributors’ and a ‘less layered process’ will loosen editorial control, and, potentially, lessen the quality of the content coming into the site from the outside.”
Read more here.
Explaining the changes at Forbes
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Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes Media, writes Thursday about the changes occurring at the business magazine.
Dvorkin writes, “Today, Forbes takes yet another bold step forward, knowing the world demands still more from its media industry. We are soft launching (yes, that means bugs) a blogging platform that puts news — and what I like to call ‘Entrepreneurial Journalism’ — at the center of social media. It’s just the first step in our plans to open up our digital and print platforms to content creators, consumers and marketers alike. The platform was initially developed by True/Slant, a start-up company that Forbes Media invested in 2008 and purchased just two months ago. I was its founder and CEO.
“We believe there is much excitement in store for loyal Forbes readers and Web users — and we hope new ones, too. With the release of The Forbes 400 in late September we will unveil a completely re-architected and redesigned magazine. It will evolve over subsequent issues (as these things always do), with an eye toward introducing a Web sensibility to print. Simultaneously, we will introduce Phase 1 of a new Forbes.com. The first digital enhancements will be squarely focused on the Rich List.
“Magazines and web sites are vastly different products with uniquely different missions. I know that as well as anyone. I’ve spent the equivalent of a full career in each medium. As the year unfolds, you’ll see a growing kinship between Forbes magazine and Forbes.com. There is a strong place for each product with audiences, and there are ways for each to reinforce the other.”
Read more here.
Forbes sells Investopedia for $42 million
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Robin Wauters of TechCrunch reports that Forbes has sold its Investopedia site to ValueClick for $42 million.
Wauters writes, “The site has self-reportedly built nearly 30,000 pieces of financial related content and develops an additional 7,000 pieces of content on an annual basis. Investopedia is said to generate most of its traffic organically and monetizes primarily by selling cost-per-impression display advertising through its direct sales force.
“The site attracts 2.2 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to comScore and boasts some 3.1 million newsletter and 1.7 million email subscribers.
“Investopedia’s management team and employees have been retained by ValueClick and the business will run as a wholly-owned subsidiary.”
Read more here.
Forbes relaunching all blogs, and every reporter will have one
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Joe Pompeo of The Business Insider reports Monday evening that Forbes.com will relaunch its blog network later this week, and that all of the reporters at the business magazine will have a blog.
Pompeo writes, “We also hear that every reporter will now be required to have his or her own blog, and that most are starting from scratch. It’s a big departure from the online practices of former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, who was decidedly anti-blog. (He resigned last July to start his own company.)
“But it certainly seems to jive with the mindset of Forbes’ new editorial director, Lewis D’Vorkin, who founded the blogging startup True/Slant (now owned by Forbes) and wants to bring on ‘hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of freelance contributors.’
“We have a call out to the editor overseeing the relaunch and will update with more details if we hear back.”
Read more here. DISCLOSURE: Select content from Talking Biz News appears on “The Biz Blog” on Forbes.com, which covers media, Hollywood and celebrities.
Changes online and in newsroom for Forbes
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Folio magazine’s Jason Fell has some details about what’s going on at Forbes magazine under new leader Lewis Dvorkin.
Fell writes, “Dvorkin says he is starting with a ‘re-architecture’ of Forbes.com—of how it’s produced, its structure, its user interface and design. ‘Forbes.com has grown so big so fast it’s time to simplify things for a better user experience,’ he says. ‘In some ways, that growth has hidden so much of what Forbes has to offer.’
“But his plans don’t stop there. In addition to promoting entrepreneurial journalism and the notion of incentive-based compensation, Dvorkin’s priorities include building ‘a new kind of newsroom’ that’s focused on data analysis and audience development, creating opportunities for integrative conversational marketing and developing a scalable content creation model for both the Web and the magazine to cover verticals in-depth.
“‘Everyone wants to be successful, and Forbes helps them be just that by championing free enterprise and entrepreneurship,’ he says. ‘Our focus on wealth creation, investing and the capitalistic endeavors — powered by expert reporting, analysis and perspective — is a strong place to be in a world seeking voices they can trust.’”
Read more here.
Forbes to launch Middle East edition
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Forbes announced the signing of an agreement to launch Forbes Middle East in partnership with Arab Publisher House.
The magazine, Forbes’ latest international edition, will be based in Dubai, and the first issue slated to be published in October.
Forbes Middle East will have an initial circulation of 25,000, eventually rising to 30,000. The initial edition will be printed in Arabic, but an English version will be launched in 2011.
Arab Publisher House is a newly formed joint venture of influential Saudi Arabian investors with its head office in Dubai Media City; it plans to bring to the region a number of other key publications, including ForbesWoman, ForbesLife and other magazines.
There are also Forbes licensee editions in China, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Turkey. According to published reports, the previous Forbes edition in the Middle East shut down in 2009 after its partner went out of business.
ME Post likely candidate to be next Forbes editor
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Joe Pompeo of The Business Insider reports that Tom Post is the most likely internal candidate to replace William Baldwin as editor of Forbes.
Baldwin announced Tuesday that he was stepping down.
Pompeo writes, “Post, who was one of two staffers promoted to a managing editor title in October 2008, has been with the magazine for roughly 13 years. Prior to Forbes he was at ABC News.
“But whoever gets the job, it seems safe to assume that he (or she!) will cede much of his influence to Lewis D’Vorkin, Forbes’ newly-installed chief product officer overseeing ‘all editorial areas,’ who came on board in late May as part of a deal the company struck to acquire his freelance blogging startup, True/Slant.
“D’Vorkin’s tenure so far has been met with skepticism from staffers trying to adjust to some of his arguably controversial ideas about journalism and entrepreneurship, like the notion of assembling an army of freelancers to churn out content for the magazine and website.”
Steve Forbes statement on Forbes editor William Baldwin
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Steve Forbes, the CEO of Forbes Inc., issued the following announcement to the magazine’s staff on Tuesday in the wake of the announcement by editor William Baldwin that he is stepping down after 11 years of running the magazine.
“This morning Bill Baldwin told his editorial colleagues that he was stepping down as Editor of Forbes magazine, a post that he has held since 1999. In his new role, effective September 1, Bill will be a contributor, columnist and blogger, with the title Investment Strategies Editor. His story subjects will be the ones to which he has recently devoted his Sidelines column: taxes, asset allocation, money managers and investment products.
“With a handful of other individuals such as Jim Michaels, Bill Baldwin played a critical part in making Forbes a unique, formidable force in American journalism. He has been a superb editor of Forbes: readership of our magazine is at an all-time high. He has an insightful knack for spotting talent and he has been a restless innovator. For example he was an early and constant advocate of Forbes going online and pouring in the resources that have made the website the premium destination for business people. He also has an incredible eye for detail, which didn’t always make him popular with subjects of Forbes articles. Financial institutions, for instance, hated it when the magazine exposed products that hurt investors with too-high, oft-hidden fees. Thanks to Bill’s advocacy for our statistical department, Forbes has data analysis skills our competition lacks.
“In his new role Bill will continue to be appear on Forbes on Fox and other television shows and will be a participant at conferences and other events.
“My siblings, our colleagues here at Forbes and I are deeply grateful for the extraordinary devotion and outstanding service Bill has given to Forbes and more fundamentally to Forbes Media audiences.
“And we are delighted he will continue to enrich the Forbes editorial product.”
