Ken Doctor’s piece points to an interesting irony: The success Forbes has had in opening up the conversation to new points of view, in ceding command and control from a central editorial authority to include hundreds of new, credible, authentic voices and tens of thousands of worthwhile comments from “people formerly known as the audience” is what put them on the map again. People weren’t talking about Forbes in June 2010 — when they acquired the company I built with Lewis Dvorkin — the way they are today. It’s unlikely Forbes would be vetting multiple bidders at 10x or even 5x earnings had we not reshaped their business in the image of True/Slant following the acquisition. Neither Ken Doctor nor many others would be talking about them if Forbes hadn’t built a successful, thousand-strong contributor network, or if they hadn’t included marketers’ voices in their native ad products.

These successes are also what has diluted Forbes’ “serious business identity” and brand value proposition in the eyes of many. We created a more equal playing field. That means that we not only raised the profile of contributors by providing them adjacency to staff editors and the brand, we have also put the brand and the staff next to contributors with fewer traditional bona fides.

Two notes to make here:

- Most of the same industry executives, analysts and pundits who decry the dilution of Forbes’ brand value proposition are among the same who’ve been scrambling to assemble their own answers to creating cost-effective content at scale and native advertising products.

- Secondly, there are a small handful of publications with the kind of history and brand value to begin with that it would matter at all that they widened their door to additional, more non-traditional editorial talent and advertising products.

Thinking that runs contrary to either of these is a real danger to the focus required for better than 99% of the publications looking to survive and thrive today.

Creating sustainable models for news and entertainment publishing has real and direct impact to 100% the people who practice it, the magazines and newspapers that carry it, and the organizations that need to make money doing it. Outside of the 1%, over-concern for opening the doors too wide for non-credentialed writers or fear of brand dilution will distract from the fundamental issues of survival and success. These concerns aren’t unfounded, but they take precious time and focus away from the work at hand: finding publications’ own mix of content at scale and the inclusion of marketers’ messages with rest of their points of view. These aren’t the only tactics that work, but they are workable tactics.

Doctor references several of the 1% in his piece. The Atlantic is one. They’ve been well-shepherded into the digital space. While mostly sticking to staff writers and editors, they’ve done a fine and profitable job with native advertising.

Doctor notes others in the 1%:

“Not that long ago, in the old print business world, names like Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek went together like CBS, NBC, and ABC, or Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.”

BusinessWeek puts out fine, data-rich editorial. They have bloggers and custom publishing ads available. Fortune, Time, Newsweek, and US News, are less-than-thriving. Newsweek sold “for a song,” as noted. US News no longer publishes a regular newsstand print product. Fortune and Time’s edit staffs will be reporting directly into their business unit.

Tangentially: CBS, NBC, and ABC had come to terms with native ads since before it was called that with soap operas and product placement. They’ve been in the distributed content creation game with user-submitted video, and reality shows produced by teams outside the network’s direct control.

From the Guardian piece Doctor references regarding the model we developed at True/Slant and honed at Forbes:

“Newspaper editors in the UK would be aghast at the prospect of 1,000 unedited journalists roaming freely on their websites with access to the internal editing and publishing tools; but they would be even more hostile to the idea of allowing advertisers the same access to self-publish.”

The reality continues to appear that, while editors are aghast, they’ll remain awash in red ink and staff cuts. “Unedited” is also misleading. Contributors are vetted and managed with care. There is oversight and contributors’ work can be tweaked at any point in the process — pre- or post-publish. Contributors are regularly managed out of the active roster. Authenticity and immediacy of work online often trump line edits; magazine pieces continue to go through a traditional editorial workflow. Contributors talk about the platform and process in glowing terms. The wider community of participants — readers, commenters, those who share on LinkedIn, Facebook and elsewhere — is engaged and growing (internal monthly uniques were about 12mm when I arrived in May 2010 and 35mm when I left October 2012 to re-build Parade Digital). Advertisers are literally buying into it. Others ignore these successes at their peril.