What Happened To Forbes?

Forbes magazine is one of the great financial and business publications of all time—along with the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times, it’s often part of the finance professional’s daily briefing since the 1920s. It’s headquartered here in New York City.

There are plenty of great stories about entrepreneurial success and strategy, something for every shade of businessperson. Everyone looks forward to their countdowns, like the Power Rankings, America’s Best Cities and the 400 Wealthiest. “Thoughts On the Business Of Life” always takes up the final page. And for me, there’s Ken Fisher’s investment column somewhere in the middle, which I find myself reading before anything else.

So yes, the physical print edition of Forbes lives up to its subtitle of “Information For the World’s Business Leaders.”

Its online edition is a farce.

The problem starts with the writers’ portraits. For the veteran columnists in the print edition, there are dignified, black and white charcoal drawings of their mugs. On the website, everyone has a faux-dramatic selfie.

And before I get to the writing itself, I’m a blogger too. I realize we’re in the business of generating traffic and ultimately, profit. We want to get readers excited about what we have to present.

But we have to remember for whom we are writing.

And this is where the younger writers on Forbes especially are falling down on the job, because frankly, many of them write as if they have no idea what Forbes is, or who its readership is. It’s possible many of them have never even held a physical copy of the magazine!

Many of the topics on the homepage are completely inappropriate, and the restrained dignity that has made the print edition so enduring has been pushed aside in favor of cheap hyperbole and utterly irrelevant garbage.

If I’m in charge of this operation over there, I’m calling all the writers into my office and laying down the following:

If you want to review Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, put that shit on Entertainment Weekly, not here. This is Forbes.

If you want to write cheap political pieces like “Obama’s Sanctions Will Destroy Putin” or “Did Obama Just Destroy The Internet?” put that shit on CNN or Fox, not here. This is Forbes.

If you want to talk your NCAA bracket (seriously?), put that shit on ESPN. This is Forbes.

You guys know I’m generally pretty sour about most media anyway, but thank God the print edition is still quality reading. Am I wrong here? Has anyone else noticed Forbes going the way of the Wall Street Journal, et al?