Great reporters leading the way at Forbes

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about some of the magazine’s top reporters who are making a name for themselves.

Here are two:

Kashmir Hill: Only a few years ago Kashmir was in a magazine writing program at New York University and interning at True/Slant, the startup I founded. Then she joined FORBES. This month she lived for seven straight days using Bitcoin, a digital-only currency, to pay for all her needs. Rather then write one story after her experience was over, she tweeted snippets of the story in real time, waded into the comments on Reddit.com and posted a log each morning about life on Bitcoin — and the characters she encountered along the way. “That worked out very well,” she said. “I got tons of emails, tweets and comments as to sources I should  talk to and places I could go that took Bitcoins.” Kashmir picked up 800 new Twitter followers over the week (she now has 12,800). “The wisdom of the crowd helped me become an expert on what was basically a new topic to me, and helped surface many of the most important individuals in the Bitcoin community.” At the end of her Bitcoin existence, Kashmir organized a dinner at a Bitcoin-accepting sushi restaurant, inviting interested readers through Twitter, Reddit and a Bitcoin Meetup group. “I thought I would get a group of 15 to 20. I wound up with 70 people.” You can see her video interviews from that night in her last post, 21 Things I Learned About Bitcoin By Living On It.

Clare O’Connor: Starting out by unearthing billionaires as part of our wealth team (see her post on Sara Blakely), Clare recently took on a staff writer’s job covering retail. Right out of the gate, her post about a new app that enables consumers to scan their shopping carts and boycott retailers they find objectionable took off on Facebook — nearly 400,000 shares in three days. That produced a slew of comments, nearly all which Clare engaged with by either approving — “Calling them out,” as we say — or actually responding to. “I always try to do that because I want to encourage repeat visitors to my site and to FORBES, and also because some of the people in this community we’ve created have excellent questions and valuable input.” Like many of our staffers and contributors, Clare frequently gets ideas for follow-up posts from comments. “It takes time interacting like this with hundreds of readers, especially if I’m on deadline for a magazine story, so I’ll reply to, say, 15 at a time and check back two hours later. I’m trying to learn to ignore trolls, who emerge like clockwork from behind anonymous avatars.”

Read more here.