Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how the business magazine wants to do more data visualization.
Dvorkin writes, “B.C. Forbes had a vision that his son, Malcolm, and his sons stuck with. In his own way, Malcolm advanced his father’s idea as boldly as Halberstam’s chosen moguls pushed their own beliefs. B.C.’s original idea was straight forward: people want to be successful. Since 1917, FORBES has chronicled human aspiration — the good, the bad and the ugly. It was a solid vision then and remains more so today. Four years ago, we changed the way we carried out that vision. Digital publishing and the advertising market demanded media companies do something. So, we tied that 100-year-old vision to a new economic model — entrepreneurial journalism and native advertising — and changed a century of antiquated newsroom processes, or methods.
“Challenges still loom. That’s why I pay so much attention to news startups. In fact, FORBES is looking to do more data visualization a la FiveThirtyEight. We’re learning from Circa and Yahoo Digest, a mobile content aggregation app developed by Summly’s founder. If statups and legacy media are honest with one another, each is pursuing what the other got to first. At Newsweek in the 80s, we talked about how our “explanatory journalism” would protect us against TV’s simplistic sound bytes. From birth, USA Today (I briefly worked for its syndicated television show) touted its graphics, some as in-depth as any of today’s data visualization masterpieces. I’ve watched as both traditional media and startups draft off the individual branding and native ad concepts FORBES implemented in 2010. We’ve riffed off of what others did 100 years ago, including B.C.’s one-time boss, William Randolph Hearst, who collected celebrity experts.”
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