Lewis Dvorkin, chief product officer of Forbes, writes about the business magazine’s new articles page on its website.
Dvorkin writes, “There’s been a lot of teeth gnashing lately about the future of the article page on the Web. Some believe it too closely mimics newspaper and magazine formats. Others argue it’s less relevant as news and information is increasingly reported via tweets and texts rather than traditional narrative stories. Proponents believe it still has a place, but that context and analysis need to replace regurgitation of what’s already been widely disseminated through the tools of social media. In the back and forth, what’s rarely, if ever, discussed is the article page’s preeminent role in the monetization of any news site.
“Today, FORBES launched Phase 1 of an exciting new article page for the era of social media, the next step in the iterative rebuild of Forbes.com. It’s a key component of our unfolding strategy to put our authoritative journalism at the center of a social experience by providing reporters and writers with the publishing tools and audience data they need to connect with consumers. If you total up our FORBES staffers and contributors, we have 850 topic-specific experts using our platform to do just that.
“This new page has a history that reflects the dramatic changes in news consumption. A digital media colleague of mine, Jim Brady, saw early-stage concepts before its initial launch a few years ago. His reaction was immediate: ‘What you’re doing is turning Facebook inside out.’ Jim’s description has always worked for me. If the core of Facebook is self-published community content and the sharing of links the community finds valuable, the core of FORBES is that valuable information with the community gathering around the expert who published it. Today’s article page release tightens the author-audience relationship and furthers our effort to build a scalable content-creation engine of individually branded journalists, authors, academics and other qualified contributors.”
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