> The easiest way is to know what you're talking about, write often and follow the best practices of news craft (i.e., pick up the phone and call people, be clear and don't make shit up). Our channel editors and staff writers are always on the watch for people they trust, would read and would want their posts adjacent to. It is an evolving vetting process. I've turned people down who are mostly issue advocates or run non-profits. This kind of mouthpiece stuff is what made HuffPo unreadable. We've parted ways with contributors for writing shoddy, libelous posts. We've taken people down for flogging their own newsletter, investment advisory business, PR agency, whatever. We have economists, financial advisors, lawyers, environmentalists, lockpickers, liberals, libertarians, China watchers, NY tech scene watchers, people covering only celebrity tweets. We like freelance journalists, who only have themselves to flog. I would personally rather sign someone up who wrote short every day than someone who wrote 2,000 word posts three times a month.
(Bruce Upbin)
So I don't think it's accurate to describe Forbes as a self-publishing tool.
> Hmm, if they're not paying him, why does he just put links to these articles on his own blog, instead of copying the whole article
Because Forbes also still just about has enough cachet for people to want to associate their subject matter expertise with it - far more of a motivation than contributor fees for someone with Templeton's background and earning power - and probably also has rules around duplicate content
It's closer to Huffington Post than Medium, but I think the point being made is that there's zero editorial oversight in between the author drafting the post and it appearing on Forbes' website, just the possibility that someone at Forbes might remove "shoddy, libellous posts" at a later stage. I don't think Forbes would have any issue if Brad thought cheap sensationalism was a better way of promoting himself to the Forbes audience (and I doubt he'd quit writing if he wasn't potentially able to earn as much as $50 per blog!)
I don't think "zero editorial oversight in between the author drafting the post and it appearing on Forbes' website" is equivalent to "mainly a blogging/self-publishing tool like Medium", given the large amount of editorial oversight evidently involved at other stages of the process. And, though I agree that Forbes's cachet is more of a motivation than contributor fees, "The author, Brad Templeton, is not employed or paid by Forbes" is evidently a flat-out lie.
Based on what I knew from about five years ago, "it's complicated."
At least at the time, brands could buy a slot. I wrote for a company a couple of times. I think the pieces were very lightly edited.
There were/are also "contributors" who were mostly individuals who didn't have gross obvious conflicts of interest in the topics they wrote about. I think they either wrote for free or were paid some nominal sum. Again, I think there was light editing.
The latter is also what you saw with the CNET Blog Network which I did write for over a number of years at a time when everyone was branding and blogging including journalists and analysts. (I declined to accept money for various reasons. Other people were paid a modest amount.)
The problem with these things is that there are always going to be conflicts of interest and biases to various degrees. Some organizations try very hard to weed out direct examples of the former at least outside of explicit op-ed pages. But it's hard to manage. To give a current example, maybe you're bullish on generative AI because you work or consult for a company doing it no matter what reservations you have. Or maybe you work for the company because you're bullish on it. Or back in the day Microsoft's a client of your's because you really like what they're doing and they engaged you and passed on the Unix expert who didn't think much of what Microsoft was doing.
CNET got increasingly uncomfortable with the whole model and dropped it.
>Hmm, if they're not paying him, why does he just put links to these articles on his own blog (ideas.4brad.com), instead of copying the whole article?
Probably because of some combination of his deal with Forbes doesn't allow him to do so and it's often better to have a post/article in one place where it gets the most traffic. (There are other reasons why you might post in multiple places if you can, but SEO is probably not one of them.)
> The easiest way is to know what you're talking about, write often and follow the best practices of news craft (i.e., pick up the phone and call people, be clear and don't make shit up). Our channel editors and staff writers are always on the watch for people they trust, would read and would want their posts adjacent to. It is an evolving vetting process. I've turned people down who are mostly issue advocates or run non-profits. This kind of mouthpiece stuff is what made HuffPo unreadable. We've parted ways with contributors for writing shoddy, libelous posts. We've taken people down for flogging their own newsletter, investment advisory business, PR agency, whatever. We have economists, financial advisors, lawyers, environmentalists, lockpickers, liberals, libertarians, China watchers, NY tech scene watchers, people covering only celebrity tweets. We like freelance journalists, who only have themselves to flog. I would personally rather sign someone up who wrote short every day than someone who wrote 2,000 word posts three times a month.
(Bruce Upbin)
So I don't think it's accurate to describe Forbes as a self-publishing tool.
https://bloggingtips.com/how-to-write-for-forbes/ says Forbes pays their contributing bloggers US$250 a month.