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Something radical had to be done, of course; between 2007 and 2009, ad pages at Forbes plunged 40%, as did the traffic to Forbes.com. Enter the new "chief product officer," Lewis D'Vorkin, who is ready to radically reinvent Forbes
, including (but not limited to):
According to a 19-page presentation that was distributed to advertisers and obtained by Crain's, Mr. D'Vorkin will turn Forbes into a digital-age print property with a "web-compatible aesthetic" and a rededicated focus on long-form journalism. Forbes.com will put news at the center of social media conversations and foster "participatory story-building" to bring users and other journalists into the discussion.
Sounds good, I suppose. But then Business Insider plucks out this tidbit from the Crain's story:
Forbes bloggers, which will include new outside contributors and former writers from True/Slant, D'Vorkin's now shuttered startup (every editorial staffer is also now being required to blog), will be paid based on their web traffic and online user engagement stats, according to Crain's New York's Matthew Flamm, who has has a few additional details on D'Vorkin's plans for the website and magazine.
Many other writers (perhaps even "hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands" of them, we assume) will not be paid at all, a la The Huffington Post, Flamm reports.
And that's the part where I just plain stop caring. Because when a major industry player about savvy money and business-building decides that bloggers should work for free, I tend to wonder if the credibility they're going to lose is worth the money they're supposedly saving.
I almost don't know where to begin, with this. First, every staffer is going to be required to blog, either for free or on some compensation system tied to traffic? Some might call this ambitious. I'm just going to call it stupid. How many staffers does Forbes have? There is such a thing as information overload, and we're about to see it in action. Some of those staffers can probably write compelling, unique blogs. But I tend to doubt that all of them can. Blogging is its own art form. Okay, I feel a little silly referring to it as an art form, but you get my point. Blogging is not article-writing, nor is it print journalism, nor is it novel creation. It is its own craft, and some excellent bloggers are really lousy other-kinds-of-writing writers. It stands to reason that many fine editorial staffers just aren't going to be very good at blogging. (Is anyone else picturing those "so easy a caveman can do it!" commercials right now? I love how "let's just have them all blog!" is such a popular corporate refrain these days, as if there's no skill to it at all, and everyone can and should do it.) Even if every single one of them turned out to be an awesome blogger, would their various interests/areas of expertise be so diverse that there will never be any sort of overlap between all of these compulsory blogs?
That's leaving aside the issue of most (all?) of them probably feeling like they don't have time to take on regular blogging (if they're not blogging already) on top of their other duties, and also leaving aside the fact that this super-duper-reinvention involves telling people to work for free.
There's a funny thing about writing that a lot of people fail to grasp: You tend to get what you pay for. And while it's true that plenty of people blog for free, they're not doing so on a mandate from their employer. If I choose to blog for free, that's my prerogative. If a client of mine demanded that I write for them for free, I would have a hard time not laughing. (It might go something like this: "Good one! Wait... were you serious? You... I... uhhhh. Yeah. No.")
There are times when it makes sense to write for free, and times when giving away your work has some non-monetary benefit that makes it worth your while. Donating your time/work to a worthy cause, for example, would be a case where not getting paid is okay. Or writing for a site that's not making any money, but which shares your vision on some topic; or maybe even a case where a site can and should pay its writers, but the exposure of writing for them is likely to
