Steve Bertoni, assistant managing editor of Forbes, spoke with Meredith Klein of Meredith and the Media about his job.
Here is an excerpt:
- You’ve been a journalist for nearly two decades, working your way up from intern to staff writer to assistant managing editor over 17 years at Forbes. What are some of the stories and experiences you’re most proud of and why?
- Forbes has a great tradition of leadership who started there as interns. Our Chief Content Officer, Randall Lane, was an intern back in the day.
- I got hired by Forbes magazine back when we printed on dead trees 28-times a year. The magazine and dotcom were separated, so Forbes.com was down the street in a separate office. With early dotcom, if you got on the front page of Bing or MSN, that was the goal.
- In the early 2000s, they brought the magazine, blog, and web together—it was so interesting to be there at the explosion of multimedia journalism.
- I worked on the Forbes 400, which is one of our wealth lists, and I got my first big break and cover story in 2011 with Sean Parker. What was cool was that my first cover story on my first billionaire was about someone my age. It was during the explosion of social media and technology, and that story led to five different cover stories. It started a chain reaction. Sean introduced me to a young Swedish entrepreneur who wanted to revolutionize music, Daniel Ek, and then I did a cover story on Daniel and Spotify before it came to America.
- I was on the ground floor of the Forbes 30 Under 30 franchise. I wrote a cover with Daniel Ek, and then he was on the cover of our first Forbes 30 Under 30. That was the first one ever. It’s been wild to watch that list take off. Our first Forbes 30 Under 30 party was at the 12th Street office, and a few years later, we were gathering 10,000 people in Boston and Detroit. We decided to make it smaller and will host 5,000 in Columbus, Ohio, this month. It’s also been interesting to watch that franchise become a community and a tentpole event. From 200 people to 10,000 people in five years—that’s the power of the Forbes brand and convening the power of community. It was cool to have a front-row seat for all of that.
