The battle between Forbes magazine and Forbes.com

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Stewart Pinkerton, the former managing editor of Forbes who is the author of “The Fall of the House of Forbes,” due out in September, writes about the conflicts in the past decade between the magazine’s print staff and its online writers.

Pinkerton writes:

The staffs built up walls and stereotypes between each other: print writers were seen as overpaid and lazy, writing maybe two stories a month, taking long lunches at the nearby Gotham Bar and Grill, and living it up on expense accounts that dwarfed those of dot-comers who rarely got a chance to travel anywhere. Web writers were dismissed as giggling twenty-three-year-olds in high heels and skirts who churned out silly lists and other fluff not worthy of the Forbes brand: The infamous “Top Ten Topless Beaches” list was the most frequently cited example.

Magazine writers resisted requests to do Web stories, which they considered insignificant. Most importantly, no magazine writer believed Baldwin when he said Web stories counted in the complicated system he used to calculate annual productivity for each writer. Baldwin himself frequently made fun of Web stories in staff meetings and once told the Silicon Valley bureau he didn’t want anyone spending “more than a day a month” on Forbes.com work. When magazine writers did pitch ideas to the Web, their phone calls or e-mails were often ignored.

Though giving lip service to the magazine as the “core” of the company, Forbes.com executives privately dismissed the print part of the company as irrelevant, since magazine stories generated no revenue for the site. It was a message embraced and repeated within Forbes.com, one that traveled quickly and frequently to 60 Fifth Avenue.

Web editors resisted attempts by magazine editors to recruit their best writers to do print stories. Why? Because those writers produced stories that generated lots of traffic, and Web editors got an incentive payment if they exceeded their monthly traffic goals.

Talking Biz News finished reading an advance uncorrected proof version of the book in two days. It is an easy read, especially for those interested in a behind-the-scenes look at one of the top publications in business journalism.