An Incomplete History of Forbes as a Platform for Scams, Grift and Bad Journalism

Joshua Benton, writing for NiemanLab: If you need a refresher: The Gordon Gecko 1980s and NASDAQ-boom 1990s were both very good to Forbes, but things started to drift downward in the 2000s, both in print and in the new world online. When the financial crisis hit, there were cuts and layoffs and, for the first time, a non-Forbes hired to run the place, Mike Perlis. He and chief product officer Lewis D'Vorkin came up with a revival strategy that just screams early 2010s digital media: It's all about scale, baby, scale. Forbes' staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside "contributors" -- barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were "contributors" -- or as they told people at parties, "I'm a columnist for Forbes." Let's think about incentives for a moment. Only a very small number of these contributors can make a living at it -- so it's a side gig for most. The two things that determine your pay are how many articles you write and how many clicks you can harvest -- a model that encourages a lot of low-grade clickbait, hot takes, and deceptive headlines. And many of these contributors are writing about the subject of their main job -- that's where their expertise is, after all -- which raises all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions. And their work was published completely unedited -- unless a piece went viral, in which case a web producer might "check it more carefully." All of that meant that Forbes suddenly became the easiest way for a marketer to get their message onto a brand-name site. And since this strategy did build up a ton of new traffic for Forbes -- publishing an extra 8,000 pieces a month will do that! -- lots of other publications followed suit in various ways.

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