I’ll tell you what Forbes.com is up to
Lewis Dvorkin is a nice guy. I got a good feeling from him when I met him and his whole team in an office in midtown Manhattan, back when nü-journalism blog network True/Slant was just a glint in his persnickety developer’s eye.
But Forbes.com has a reputation for being a link-whoring black hole from which real journalists escape as soon as they’re able. That’s hearsay, but it comes from a source I trust, who spent a few months miserably churning out content for them while on staff.
Something about the fact that no one does that paragon of cynical anti-usability, the pageview-generating million-page-refresh gallery quite like Forbes.com makes me believe it.
Anyway: Lewis Dvorkin. He started True/Slant, and for a while a bunch of out of work journalists brought their A-game to their posts there. I never understood why anyone would write for True/Slant for free, but maybe that’s because I’m reasonably well employed.
True/Slant’s whole model was that they would share revenue with writers. That’s a joke: as everyone knows, unless you’re Google, on the web, there is no revenue. But whatever, I’m a strong believer in the necessity of failed experiments; they often get you somewhere better.
For Lewis Dvorkin, that somewhere is Forbes. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but basically what happened with True/Slant was, hundreds of talented writers poured god only knows how many thousands of hours into it, and in the end it was mothballed as soon as they had made the platform valuable enough to be sold to Forbes. Right?
So that, mon frere, is a shell game. No one had to write on True/Slant, no one had to believe that they were participating in a bold new kind of journalism, but they did. And it seems like the only people who benefitted were the leaders and original investors in T/S.
Now Dvorkin wants to take the T/S model to Forbes. The whole idea is, as near as I can tell, to reproduce the Huffington Post. To take advantage, as they did at T/S, of all the journalists out there who are for whatever reason all too ready to give their wares away for next to nothing – or maybe even nothing! Wouldn’t that be a business model!
So when I hear that Forbes.com, notorious den of high-pressure churnalism, has found religion, I’m not surprised that it’s no less calculating than what came before.
It’s not that I think this operation will fail; It’s that I’m afraid it will succeed. In the best case scenario, it becomes a showcase for experts who have day jobs, experts who are every bit as eloquent and even better informed than the journalists they supplant. In the worst case scenario, it’s another low or no-wage content mill.
Apparently Econ 101 is not one of the courses required in j-school…
