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Forbes acquires True/Slant

May 25, 2010 /

The exciting next stage of the True/Slant vision is about to begin. Forbes Media is acquiring True/Slant and bringing it in house.

What does that mean? Some start-ups continue on as separate entities and build a business. Others become entrepreneurs within a larger company to effect change through technology innovation, new processes, creative thinking and more. Think how Twitter brought in Summize and its engineers and search technology to scale operations.

The small True/Slant team, with more than 100 years of Web, publishing and TV experience, will now be working side-by-side with talented and dedicated journalists at Forbes Media. The goal: to work together to further develop a mindset around the power of the Web and traditional news values. With hard work, we can implement new blogging platforms and more efficient digital, print and video content creation models; we can find better ways for audiences to engage with news and information; and we can pursue new integrative approaches for marketers and advertisers.

Truth/Slant: About those M&A rumors: Forbes to acquire True/Slant

(via Nieman Journalism Lab)

New York Times Magazine article on the future of news with background on True/Slant

More on research services: Forbes borrowed staff from the Economist

May 11, 2010 /

Turns out Forbes has actually had a service similar to the Economist Intelligence Unit since 2008:

In news organizations’ efforts to diversify their revenue streams, one idea — custom research — is catching on. Global Post offers businesses “our global network of credentialed journalists to find authoritative answers to your urgent questions.” We recently wrote about Iraq Oil Report, a startup that provides paying clients on-the-ground answers to their Iraq questions — and which now generates 30 percent of its revenue from those research operations.

To launch that service, Iraq Oil Report hired a veteran of the bigger player in the space, the Economist Intelligence Unit. That’s also the path chosen by Forbes, which hired an Intelligence Unit veteran, Christiaan Rizy — at the time director of business development of EIU — to launch its own custom research operation in June 2008.

The Forbes Insights division, a 13-person operation spread throughout offices in New York, Austria, and India, is already profitable, Rizy told me. Its major product is a form of tailored journalism for high-paying corporate clients. (Rizy wouldn’t get into specifics on how much a project typically runs.) The program fits with Forbes’ broader strategy of expanding into products well beyond magazines and the ads that run in them; we recently profiled their corporate “reputation tracker,” another money-maker outside of ads.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Forbes takes a page (and an employee) from The Economist to build a custom research service

Previously:

Forbes getting into services – reputation tracking

Blogs are not businesses

Future journalism business models: research and explanation services

Forbes getting into services – reputation tracking

May 10, 2010 /

More interesting than those ad guarantees is Forbes getting into the reputation tracking business. This helps confirm my bias that publications should be getting into services and not just content:

Get past advertising. It’s a commodity — and who wants to buy a commodity? But a service — that’s a different story.

That’s how Bruce Rogers, chief brand officer for Forbes, says the magazine is thinking these days. Even though circulation has remained relatively stable, Forbes sees an opportunity in thinking beyond selling advertising and diving into broader service areas for clients. […]

In conversations with chief marketing officers at major financial institutions, like Bank of America, it became clear that many of these companies were dealing with a serious corporate image problem. Rogers said those conversations led to Forbes’ latest service: a reputation tracker, which gives a company an understanding of how its corporate image is perceived by both the general public and by Forbes readers. The idea is to help companies get a benchmark for their relative strength or weakness. And the tracker will specifically test how that reputation changes after an ad campaign run in Forbes — a way to bring some of the measurability of web advertising into the more staid (and more profitable) world of print advertising.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Forbes new tool tracks advertisers’ corporate reputation

Hint: You can view a list of services I offer here.

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