A technology company, anxious to grow its userbase and hungry for content, settles on a bargain: It’ll let people publish anything they want, directly on the platform. It used to be that only a select few had that privilege — but now just about anyone with a pulse and wifi could sign up, build out their network, and start pumping out copy.
Lowering the barrier to entry will draw in some great content, they think, particularly in specific niches where a more centralized editorial operation might not know what to look for. Sure, some bad actors might take advantage of that openness, but they’ll probably be on the margins. This is democratizing publishing, people! And building scale, revenues, and profits along the way!
That’s a story you could tell about Facebook: a social network that started out with a strictly defined audience, later threw open the doors to all, and bet on being a platform for content and the direction of human attention. They found that being a place where anyone could publish anything — Medium without the fancy fonts — was enormously profitable (and legally protected). It all worked great — until that openness gets turned into an opportunity to spread misinformation, invade privacy, build Nazi fellowship, spike racial tensions, and otherwise wreak havoc on the informational ecosystem required for a healthy democracy.
But it’s also a story you could tell about, say, Forbes. The 102-year-old magazine lived most of its life as a relatively staid business publication for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (or, more aspirationally, his boss). It was a very good business that made Malcolm Forbes a borderline billionaire and gave Steve Forbes the liberty to think of himself as a presidential candidate.
But when the Internet came along (and with it a new wave of competitors), Forbes struggled — defaulting on its debt, missing rent payments, and being forced by creditors to oust Steve Forbes as CEO. In came new CEO Mike Perlis, joining chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin, and they decided to go big. The magazine would let anyone become a “contributor” who could post whatever they wanted to Forbes.com. (Okay, not “anyone” — it only felt like that. But at least 2,000 people.)
Opening those gates led to big jumps in output (8,000 posts per month!) and in traffic (nearly tripling pageviews between 2011 and 2014). It pumped some life into a declining brand and made it possible for the company to sell a majority share to a Hong Kong investment company in 2014 at a whopping $475 million valuation. Impressive!
The problem was that — just as your News Feed clogged up with junky memes, clickbait headlines, and your uncle’s crazy rants, all produced at no cost to Facebook — it was impossible to maintain quality with that much of an open-door policy. A once-esteemed publication took on the vague scent of grift: articles that looked suspiciously like press releases, writers with unknown loyalties, and just a general ick about the whole endeavor.
We now know — well, we always knew; now we have one more piece of evidence — what that sort of an arrangement can lead to. As The New York Times first reported briefly a week ago and then at more length Sunday, the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein used Forbes’ open door to whitewash his reputation after his stint in a Florida jail.
A 2013 article “by” Forbes contributor Drew Hendricks made Epstein look like a science superhero, “the financial guru” who “has become one of the largest backers of cutting-edge science around the world,” donating “up to $200 million a year to eminent scientists,” “motivated by learning more about the mind, versus creating a new start-up product.”
But the Times reported that, in fact, the story was written by a PR firm working for Epstein; Hendricks “said he was paid $600 to attach his byline and post it at Forbes.com.”
(This is the best paragraph in the Times story, by the way: “Mr. Hendricks said he had not been aware of Mr. Epstein’s history. ‘All I knew was, this is a guy doing a science thing,’ he said. ‘If I had known otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it.’” Note that he’s not saying taking $600 to fraudulently call a press release your journalistic output is the problem — only that it was done on behalf of a bad guy.)
The thing is, this blurring of editorial boundaries wasn’t an unforeseen consequence — it was baked into the model from the beginning. Forbes didn’t just blur the lines between staff reporters and unpaid contributors; it also blurred the line between editorial content and advertising to a degree that stood out even among its peers in the native advertising boom. (They even extended this to print magazine covers; the left image here is “editorial” while the right one is an ad paid for by AT&T. Think most people caught that at a glance?) Forbes only paid about a third of contributors, based on their readership numbers; as D’Vorkin put it in 2014: “The remainder find rewards in an association with FORBES that often leads to paid opportunities elsewhere.” (Drew Hendricks certainly did!)
Forbes wasn’t alone here…
