Nine lessons from the Forbes.com remake

Dorian Benkoil of PBS’ MediaShift has nine lessons that have been learned from the overhaul of Forbes.com.

Here is one of them:

4. Give contributors ownership. Really

Long gone are the days of the traditional editorial flow in which a reporter files copy which is handed off to a series of editors, layout artists and fact-checkers.

Forbes’ content management system lets the same person produce and publish a story, then go in later to update or correct it. “The audience doesn’t want to be protected, they can protect themselves,” D’Vorkin told a media management seminar in New York in June.

While that can be risky, and Forbes has been called out on occasion for mistakes, D’Vorkin believes in letting contributors also be responsible for managing their communities and curating discussions their pieces generate in social media and elsewhere.

D’Vorkin also breaks ranks with most traditional publishers by letting contributors use their content elsewhere after it’s been published on Forbes’ website.

“I don’t believe in exclusivity. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity,” he told me at the seminar. Writers “can do whatever they want with it,” after they’ve published a piece on Forbes. “We win the game with SEO, anyway,” he said.

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