For 93 years, Forbes has been an unabashed champion of free enterprise. Today, we encounter a media landscape where, for the first time in publishing, the best content and ideas are free to flow into public discourse regardless of the strength, stature or location of their author. This new market for content is filtered by search engines, curated by millions on social news sites and networks, and delivered across mobile devices, PCs and print. The traditional roles of editors and journalists have been deeply disrupted.
We rearchitected Forbes.com and redesigned Forbes Magazine in October 2010 to evolve along with this new, socially driven digital environment. Our rearchitecture made our products better, increased our print subscriber base, grew readership, drove more page views to our web properties, and empowered our reporters in new and meaningful ways. It also streamlined the way we work and allowed us to sharpen our voice. But it took considerable effort and a realistic outlook on the way the web is transforming our business.
Today’s business environment demands a global perspective, and Forbes delivers that with a worldwide footprint that includes Forbes Asia, the leading English-language pan-Asian business magazine with a circulation of 80,000; 16 local-language editions in places like India, China and Russia; and a relaunch of Forbes Magazine in Europe this past summer to an audience of 20,000 hand-selected senior executives and influentials. (Forbes’ Global 2000 Best Companies issue featured Siemens on the cover, and European companies occupy nine of the top 25 slots on the list.) Forbes.com reaches a worldwide audience of nearly 20 million unique visitors per month.
Our Vision of the Market
To understand how media is changing, it’s necessary to go beyond the notion that the journalist is the only storyteller. News can now be discussed - and ideas published - by anyone, anywhere with a few moments and a smartphone. This activity constitutes “engagement”, a term that we consider a measure of the life of the conversation between our contributors and their readers.
Digital news consumers are voracious readers: they expect the latest and most reliable information, and they want it now. They want lots of it. Many live to engage in vibrant online discussion forums. But our research has shown that magazine readers are different. They seek a more intimate experience - with the entire magazine, article or contributor. Our response has been to build a unique content engine to serve both types of news consumer.
Our Response
When we prepared to rearchitect our media properties in late 2010, it became clear that design, stories, staffing and workflow all needed to change. The end result is a new product line spanning web content, mobile apps, live events and print. To reimagine the Forbes experience, we revisited our design, user interface, creativity and advertising products. Forbes isn’t just a magazine, a website, a tablet app or series of mobile platforms. It’s a continuum of content that includes a seamless network of print, digital, mobile, tablet and live media that together amplify the power and purpose of actionable business journalism.
Honing Our Voice
The web requires that magazines offer readers a tightly focused lens and voice through which to understand the world. It must be unwavering and clearly defined. Otherwise, readership suffers attrition at the hands of more nimble digital brands that are better at luring readers. We have also started to instil digital design cues like a “Conversation” into printed pages.
Rethinking Design and Flow
Refining and projecting a magazine’s voice and message must start on the cover and continue on each and every page of the magazine and website. To that end, we set out to create a minimally designed interface and an intuitive architecture. The goal: quality content delivered efficiently and consistently across all platforms.
Forbes has sharpened its focus on the agenda-setting cover story. Covers have featured Russian tech investor Yuri Milner in the Forbes Billionaires issue; Jack Ma, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company; Siemens CEO Peter Löscher on megacities; Wikileaks’ Julian Assange; Ariana Huffington, one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women; and a conversation about wealth and the art of giving with Warren Buffet and Jay-Z.
Our new web tools allow our staff to write more stories more frequently. In turn, our online stories are invaluable in developing more in-depth presentations for the magazine. Readers help advance the conversation by adding comments and connecting with other readers. Our goal is to have this happen on Forbes.com or on social networks where our reporters are active. There, they can keep driving the discussion long after their piece is written.
Consumers have a voice, and they expect to share it — with one another and with the content creators that they choose. The design of our properties aspires to let them read and react with minimal friction. We’ve rearchitected across print, digital, mobile and live media to provide high-quality journalism that flows freely and purposefully between digital and print media - the content continuum - and is amplified through social media.
Reinventing Writing and Editing
Now all of our writing and reporting starts online. Staff members and contributors each get their own page on Forbes.com, branded with their name and their area of focus. They post often, building an audience around their writing and their followers, who come to value the reporter personally for his or her particular lens. To our core group of reporters, we are adding hundreds of knowledgeable contributors, picked by our editorial staff for their expertise in areas such as investing, personal finance, technology, business insights, leadership and success.
The audience also has a new role in content creation and editing. In today’s digital news universe, consumers frequently play the role of fact checker. They are often well-sourced and, using commenting and social media, can enter the conversation at will - and include our reporters. They can also be sources themselves. Staff writer Andy Greenberg’s series of posts about computer security attracted a large audience that happened to include Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, who subsequently submitted to an interview - a rarity - for our cover package on Wikileaks.
Digitising Editorial and Advertising Products
Forbes is proud of the print franchises it developed over the last few decades. To date, all of them have been relaunched on the web or as apps for the biggest smartphone platforms. Each app is anchored in the Forbes voice and complements our print features.
Forbes chose not to copy our peers, competitors and colleagues in the publishing space who simply reuse the content of the magazine for apps. Rather, we refocus our content to drive relevance and repeat usage by carefully selecting content for specific apps and refreshing that content more frequently. We’ll also be updating our mobile offering with HTML5 experiences around the ideas and individuals we cover. One example: an early stage People List iPad app that furnishes users with web content about our Forbes 400 members. We’ve also released an investment app based on our popular Investment Guide issue that has garnered over 170,000 downloads.
Our advertising products have changed too. Included in our September 2010 relaunch was an innovative new product called AdVoice, which gives our biggest and best advertising partners access to our publishing platform. With our tools, they can create scaled, transparently branded narratives using their own content and brand personality and cultivate their own audiences in print and online. The response to AdVoice since launch has been fantastic; partners so far include SAP, Microsoft, Toyota, Cadillac, Northwestern Mutual and gyro.
The Value of Social Networking Communities
We no longer talk about “readers”. Rather, we consider our audience to be participants in a community that stands for something. We feel our reporters and editors are a part of this community, so we’re giving them powerful online publishing tools and personal branding on their articles. We want them to curate their reporting and develop relationships with their readers. It’s our hope that Forbes reporters will become increasingly skilled at writing for multiple formats, so that our continuum of content constitutes a seamless network of print, digital, mobile, tablet, live and social media.
“Participants” serve as content syndicators. With the click of a “share” button, millions of consumers become distribution outlets, disseminating our content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites with large, voracious audiences. The more interaction we get from readers, the more convinced we can be that our editorial agenda is resonating with them. It also provides our advertisers with a robust environment for their marketing messages.
Success So Far
In the year since our relaunch, consumers have reacted well to improvements across the board. Newsstand sales of our Forbes 400 issue, the first after our relaunch, increased 34% year over year, and subsequent issues have seen bigger newsstand sales. Renewal rates have grown 2% and a recent new marketing campaign to get new subscribers performed 84% better than last year’s campaign. Online, Forbes is inching toward 20 million unique monthly visitors. So far, all signs point to continuing increases in newsstand sell-through rates, even as the rest of the industry settles into flat or negative growth.
We know today that we are in the business of content creation across multiple platforms. We know this content must be distinctively ours, with utmost attention paid to quality and timeliness. And we know we must let the “participant” inform and drive our coverage. From where we stand, the future of publishing looks bright.
