This is what’s become of Forbes. By lending its brand to anyone who can string a few sentences together, Forbes’ contributor network is now little more than a platform for promotional marketing posts and unverified pontifications. (Some of which have paid to be there, via a product called BrandVoice.) It’s never clear when you click on a Forbes link whether you’re going to find useful, reliable information, or some random contributor’s self-promotional musings. Given that Forbes now has 1200 contributors, the odds of clicking on a story by one of the 45 or so staff writers Forbes employs is fairly low.
Om Malik makes a good point as he looks carefully at what Forbes is doing to get “contributors” and blurring the line between being a PUBLICATION and a PLATFORM.
He continues, “That’s the difference between a publication and a platform: When something goes awry with a guest post, and it has, we take responsibility for it, because we are a publication. A platform which allows anything to be published with no oversight, such as Buzzfeed, Medium, and yes, Forbes, can push responsibility to the poster when there is an issue. Not our problem. We’re a platform!
Barbara K Iverson 