Back in the Malcolm Forbes days, Forbes was one of the big three US business magazines--the others being Fortune and Business Week--and it was quite good. It was my favorite of the three and I subscribed to it for a number of years.
It started declining at some point after Malcolm's death and for the past few years in particular the online site has really sold its soul for clicks. Some of its bloggers are decent but a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another and/or are more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct. And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial.
There are many more writers on Forbes now than 5 years ago. You might not like them all. They may not all be of the same, high caliber. None of them are "randos" as the parent comment noted; they all come in with a body of work and a reputation and are vetted by editors.
> a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another
That hadn't been the case. With hope, it's still not. There are ~disclosures linked from every byline. There are points of view and interests, to be sure. Those interests should be at least as transparent as they are for Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, et al.
> more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct
Well-said. This has been the trajectory of news, entertainment, and the media in general for many decades. The web has helped accelerate it, but it's not proprietary to web publishers.
> And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial
That's by design and intended to be so in a positive way: "don't just pitch products at me, but give me information I'll find useful or entertaining even if it does suit your agenda." My disclosure is I worked on BrandVoice and similar programs; I'm no longer with Forbes. My strong opinion is all media have forms of this ad/edit line-blurring via product placement, advertorial, sponsorships, and combinations of them all. (more on that https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-ther... )
re the parent post, advertorial is one way publishers are making some money and, in part, paying writers to bring you news and entertainment. It doesn't directly involve malware and usually not even ad networks. It's not intended to disrupt reading experiences -- like pop-ups, take-overs, & pre-roll -- and all the tools are there for advertisers to disclose conflicts and provide some thoughtfulness & value to people who engage with it. When that's not the case 100% of the time, it's about specific executions rather than corruption of the concept as a whole.
So I went to Google, searched "Forbes", clicked "news" and then picked something I thought looked rando. Here's a personal finance/savvy consumer contributor that certainly isn't well known extolling lottery mysticism:
(wow are there a ton of distracting ads on that article ...)
Is this an example of conflict of interest? Or just of less-than-substantial "personal finance" content? The Contributor's bio has her bona fides and point of view. http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/ She's not Charlie Munger, but he didn't start out as Charlie Munger, either.
The article is timely and relevant. "Powerball" in the article title is going to get play -- there's a multi-state, $900MM jackpot at stake tonight.
Many Contributors are paid for the traffic they drive. Most Contributors like it when their stories are widely-read. Managing those incentives, the quality of content created, the creators themselves, and their reputations is an ongoing process for the Contributors, editors, and publishers involved.
No doubt you could find more-glaring examples of less-than-substantial stories. One of my points is I'm glad this Contributor has a platform to create and publish her stories and build her community and career.
Right, it's junk click bait designed to serve a pile of ads.
I think it's awful that people are building a career by pretending that you can do better at the lotto (that's why I called it mysticism, you can't do better at the lotto).
Someone who bills themselves as helping people be savvy consumers should be pointing out that the statistics for Powerball are basically insurmountable, not having fun pretending that there are ways to beat them. That doesn't mean I didn't buy a couple tickets for fun, but I also didn't spend a lot of time figuring out what numbers will work best to beat their random number generator.
Got it. Your point was about randos, general editorial quality and caliber, and being taken seriously.
Specific decisions were made a few years ago about adding a distributed editorial workforce -- a Contributor network -- to the full-time editorial staffers. This was not a universally-beloved decision at the time. It has been a very successful one for Forbes.
My take on the basic thesis is there are more credible, authoritative people with stories to tell than could reasonably be hired as full-time staffers. Adding those voices under Forbes' brand helps scale content creation, community, and revenues. It also provides the ability to identify and nurture talented creators.
Despite Forbes' Contributor network being relatively high-touch, bringing on 1000+ new writers is going to be dilutive by definition. Historical editorial models and workflows are about command and control; scaling a contributor network is about ceding some of that. More of my take on what this success has done to Forbes' "serious business identity" is here https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/reach-and-revenue-vs-dilution...
The ability to identify and manage the Contributors and their contributions is built into the platform and processes around it. No one should get or stay in the ecosystem who shouldn't be there.
Specifically re this Powerball piece, I mostly agree. I know some people will enjoy it even if others do not. I would not expect people to borrow against their 401k for lotto tickets because of it. I don't know if or what changes should be made to it. Luckily, that's someone else's issue to handle.
There are a bunch of statistically-interesting things to consider about the jackpot, though not really about improving your odds of winning it. "(You are vastly more likely to get struck by lightning twice in your lifetime.)" -- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/powerball-jackpot-800-mi...
I didn't use the term "rando"and I agree it's not really fair. And I'm glad Forbes does have disclosures although I'm not sure how useful they are to casual readers to discern biases of one sort or another. All I can say is that, in the technology space, there are or at least have been writers who take a consistent point of view that happens to line up with various business relationships they have or have had. True, that point of view may be one they'd have anyway given that people tend to work with companies whose strategies and worldview they agree with.
As for your other points, they seem to boil down to "it's just the way the world is." I suppose that's true in many cases although I could certainly name quite a variety of pubs both online and offline, which have managed not to embrace the dark side of modern publishing quite so enthusiastically.
> I'm glad Forbes does have disclosures although I'm not sure how useful they are to casual readers to discern biases of one sort or another.
I agree with you that transparency is paramount. The FTC agrees with you and is regulating how this will work. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat... I am not a huge proponent of / believer in regulators like the FTC truly fixing the issue but do hope they'll help achieve the shared goal. People have to demand it and publishers / media orgs have to embrace it.
> boil down to "it's just the way the world is."
That's a fair encapsulation, though I'd add that it's the way the world has always been. For millennia, artists and story tellers have bemoaned the next generation -- "kids these days aren't being thoughtful or correct; they're being vulgar to appeal to the masses." This has been the case since before the Upanishads and Beowulf, since before jazz was called "the devil's music," since before anyone started selling newspapers or airtime on radio and TV. People deviating from the norm are frowned upon, then they become the norm and frown on the next generation. The progression occurs for artistic reasons -- "this is the way we think and communicate now" -- and commercial reasons -- "this headline sells."
> quite a variety of pubs both online and offline, which have managed not to embrace the dark side of modern publishing quite so enthusiastically.
This is also true. Publications like The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times have been incredibly wary of both the loss of editorial command and control that comes with allowing non-staff writers to regularly contribute stories and with selling advertorial products to advertisers. They are all getting into one or both areas to degrees.
Forbes, specifically, has been leading on both fronts and continues to push it. Those on the vanguard often have the most arrows sticking out of their chests. Some arrows are deserved; some are just from those in the norm bemoaning The Next Thing.
100% understood mine is not a popular position. The consensus from journalists and readers re advertorial is generally the same as yours. "Nobody wants them or has ever wanted them" is not a true statement: people buy and sell advertorials all the time. They are and have been a fact of the media business since there has been a media business.
There's no meaningful distinction between advertorial, product placement, sponsorships and the like in this context. E.T. eating Elliot’s Reese’s Pieces, J.Lo and Harry Connick Jr. drinking Pepsi on American Idol, Salvatore Ferragamo right under NYT’s front-page stories, WFAN's Boomer and Carton talking about their dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse were all bought and paid for by advertisers. This is how the business works and has worked. This is how your newspaper, magazine, TV show, radio program, web site, and movie are produced and brought to you.
For many people, advertising in general is crap. Done well, it can be good, informative, and entertaining. Most of us have ads we like. A lot of times, these stick out because they're exceptions. I've seen solid BBQ recipes and ERP project planning tips made possible by Reynolds and SAP. And I've seen plenty of shrill, shilly examples of paid content where I never made it beyond the first graf.
Crap ads, crap editorial, crap advertorial is about crap execution, it's not that those things are inherently crap. The people who execute them well will have success and will able to produce other work that success allows.
With regard to "poison the well," even outside of advertising -- in the "pure editorial" world -- there are always biases and points of view in play. Humans are impure. Watch a State of the Union, basketball game, or Counter-Strike tournament, and then read or watch coverage of the same from any two media outlets. There will be differences from what you observed and how they were reported. The well water is of a different quality than your understanding of it. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
With regard to "net negative," I build capabilities for people to tell stories and share them with people who care about those stories. I've gotten hundreds of creators published and paid by global publications by which they would not otherwise have been associated. I've helped these creators grow their communities, their body of work, their credentials, and their careers. They have hard data to consider this a net-positive, and I agree.
It started declining at some point after Malcolm's death and for the past few years in particular the online site has really sold its soul for clicks. Some of its bloggers are decent but a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another and/or are more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct. And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial.