Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees content at Forbes magazine, writes about how the media world is changing how it delivers information about businesses.
“At Forbes, we’re beginning to open up our print and digital platforms so many more knowledgeable and credible content creators can provide information and perspective and connect with one another. In doing so, we will be totally transparent. All participants will be clearly identified, delineated and labeled.
“Audience participation has long been part of Forbes.com. With the launch of this year’s Forbes 400, we began to place reader content in the contextual flow of the pages of our magazine (and there is much more to come). In next week’s issue we introduce a similar concept for advertisers. Today, SAP, a leading business software company, became our first digital AdVoice partner.”
Read more here.
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Lew talks as if the concept "vested interest" didn't exist.
"Audience members with deep topic-specific expertise successfully took on quite a few professional journalists with far less knowledge," he says in describing how the Web created new possibilities for corporate interests to follow Mobil's pioneering efforts to tell the American public the truth about energy.
Right. These "audience members" also have an agenda, and one of the traditional roles of those editorial gatekeepers that Lew is now ready to dispense with is to put that agenda in context. Yes, the Web permits a dialogue, and those interested in the insights of Intel staffers can go to Intel's site.
I think we all embrace the diversity of ideas, opinions and informations that the Web makes available. My question is why Forbes as a Web site should be the aggregator of all this wonderful content from "marketers" and "consumers". Will it be open to absolutely everyone or is someone still deciding which choice Intel pieces will be "republished"? Calling SAP "our first digital AdVoice partner" certainly seems to suggest that these corporate shils will pay to have their content on the Forbes site and presumably since everything will be "transparent" that fact will that be disclosed.
Why not, really? But then the headline above should cut out the last word to read "How Forbes is changing." Call the new Forbes what you will -- a content marketplace, a corporate-consumer dialogue, a hack forum -- it has nothing to do with journalism.