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Forbes

Cover for December 20, 2010, featuring Julian Assange
Editor-in-chief	Steve Forbes
Editor	Randall Lane[1]
Categories	Business magazine
Frequency	Biweekly
Total circulation (2013)	931,558[2]
First issue	September 15, 1917; 101 years ago (1917-09-15)
Company	Forbes Media, LLC. (51%: Integrated Whale Media Investments; 49%: Forbes family)
Country	United States
Based in	Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S.
Language	English
Website	forbes.com
ISSN	0015-6914

The former headquarters of Forbes on 5th Avenue in Manhattan (now owned by New York University)

Forbes (/fɔːrbz/) is an American business magazine. Published bi-weekly, it features original articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. Forbes also reports on related subjects such as technology, communications, science, politics, and law. Its headquarters is located in Jersey City, New Jersey. Primary competitors in the national business magazine category include Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek. The magazine is well known for its lists and rankings, including of the richest Americans (the Forbes 400), of the world's top companies (the Forbes Global 2000), and The World's Billionaires. The motto of Forbes magazine is "The Capitalist Tool". Its chair and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, and its CEO is Mike Federle.^[3] It was sold to a Hong Kong-based investment group, Integrated Whale Media Investments.^[4][5]

Company history

Forbes Building on Fifth Avenue in New York City (now owned by New York University)

B. C. Forbes, a financial columnist for the Hearst papers, and his partner Walter Drey, the general manager of the Magazine of Wall Street,^[6] founded Forbes magazine on September 15, 1917.^[7][8] Forbes provided the money and the name and Drey provided the publishing expertise. The original name of the magazine was Forbes: Devoted to Doers and Doings.^[6] Drey became vice-president of the B.C. Forbes Publishing Company,^[9] while B.C. Forbes became editor-in-chief, a post he held until his death in 1954. B.C. Forbes was assisted in his later years by his two eldest sons, Bruce Charles Forbes (1916–1964) and Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (1917–1990).

Bruce Forbes took over on his father's death, and his strengths lay in streamlining operations and developing marketing.^[7] During his tenure, 1954–1964, the magazine's circulation nearly doubled.^[7]

On Bruce's death, his brother Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes Jr. (born 1919) became President and Chief executive of Forbes and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine.^[10] Between 1961 and 1999 the magazine was edited by James Michaels.^[11] In 1993, under Michaels, Forbes was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.^[12] In 2006, an investment group Elevation Partners that includes rock star Bono bought a minority interest in the company with a reorganization, through a new company, Forbes Media LLC, in which Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com, along with other media properties, is now a part.^[10][13] A 2009 New York Times report said: "40 percent of the enterprise was sold ... for a reported $300 million, setting the value of the enterprise at $750 million". Three years later, Mark M. Edmiston of AdMedia Partners observed, "It's probably not worth half of that now".^[14] It was later revealed that the price had been US$264 million.^[15]

Sale of headquarters

In January 2010, Forbes reached an agreement to sell its headquarters building Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to New York University; terms of the deal were not publicly reported, but Forbes would continue to occupy the space under a sale-leaseback arrangement.^[16] The company's headquarters subsequently moved to the Newport section of downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2014.^[17][18]

Sale to Integrated Whale Media (51% stake)

In November 2013, Forbes Media, which publishes Forbes magazine, was put up for sale.^[19] This was encouraged by minority shareholders Elevation Partners. Sale documents prepared by Deutsche Bank revealed that the publisher's 2012 EBITDA was US$15 million.^[20]Forbes reportedly sought a price of US$400 million.^[20] In July 2014, the Forbes family bought out Elevation and then sold a 51 per cent majority of the company to Integrated Whale Media Investments.^[15][4][5]

Other publications

Apart from Forbes and its lifestyle supplement, Forbes Life, other titles include Forbes Asia and fifteen local language editions. Steve Forbes and his magazine's writers offer investment advice on the weekly Fox TV show Forbes on Fox and on Forbes on Radio. Other company groups include Forbes Conference Group, Forbes Investment Advisory Group and Forbes Custom Media. From the 2009 Times report: "Steve Forbes recently returned from opening up a Forbes magazine in India, bringing the number of foreign editions to 10." In addition, that year the company began publishing ForbesWoman, a quarterly magazine published by Steve Forbes's daughter, Moira Forbes, with a companion Web site.^[14]

The company formerly published American Legacy magazine as a joint venture, although that magazine separated from Forbes on May 14, 2007.^[21]

The company also formerly published American Heritage and Invention & Technology magazines. After failing to find a buyer, Forbes suspended publication of these two magazines as of May 17, 2007.^[22] Both magazines were purchased by the American Heritage Publishing Company and resumed publication as of the spring of 2008.^[23]

Forbes has published the Forbes Travel Guide since 2009.

On January 6, 2014, Forbes magazine announced that, in partnership with app creator Maz, it was launching a social networking app called "Stream". Stream allows Forbes readers to save and share visual content with other readers and discover content from Forbes magazine and Forbes.com within the app.^[24]

Forbes.com

Forbes.com is part of Forbes Digital, a division of Forbes Media LLC. Forbes's holdings include a portion of
RealClearPolitics. Together these sites reach more than 27 million unique visitors each month.
Forbes.com employs the slogan "Home Page for the World's Business Leaders" and claimed, in 2006, to be the world's most widely visited business web site.^[25] The 2009 Times report said that, while "one of the top five financial sites by traffic [throwing] off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, [it] never yielded the hoped-for public offering".^[14]

Forbes.com uses a "contributor model" in which a wide network of "contributors" writes and publishes articles directly on the website.^[26] Contributors are paid based on traffic to their respective Forbes.com pages; the site has received contributions from over 2,500 individuals, and some contributors have earned over US$100,000, according to the company.^[26]Forbes currently allows advertisers to publish blog posts on its website alongside regular editorial content through a program called BrandVoice, which accounts for more than 10 percent of its digital revenue.^[27] Forbes.com also publishes subscription investment newsletters, and an online guide to web sites, Best of the Web. In July, 2018 Forbes deleted an article by a contributor who argued that libraries should be closed, and Amazon should open bookstores in their place.^[28]

David Churbuck founded Forbes's web site in 1996. The site uncovered Stephen Glass's journalistic fraud in The New Republic in 1998, an article that drew attention to internet journalism. At the peak of media coverage of alleged Toyota sudden unintended acceleration in 2010, it exposed the California "runaway Prius" as a hoax, as well as running five other articles by Michael Fumento challenging the entire media premise of Toyota's cars gone bad. The site, like the magazine, publishes many lists focusing on billionaires and their possessions, especially expensive homes, a critical aspect of the website's popularity.^[29]

Currently, the website also blocks internet users using ad blocking software (such as Adblock Plus) from accessing articles, demanding that the website be put on the ad blocking software's whitelist before access is granted.^[30] Forbes argues that this is done because customers using ad blocking software do not contribute to the site's revenue. Malware attacks have been noted to occur from Forbes site.^[31]

See also

• Forbes 500


• Forbes 30 Under 30

References

Further reading

• Forbes, Malcolm S. (1974) Fact and Comment Knopf, New York,
  ISBN 0-394-49187-4; twenty-five years of the editor's columns from Forbes
  


• Grunwald, Edgar A. (1988) The Business Press Editor New York University Press, New York,
  ISBN 0-8147-3016-7
  


• Holliday, Karen Kahler (1987)A Content Analysis of Business Week, Forbes and Fortune from 1966 to 1986 Masters of Journalism thesis from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 69 pages,
  OCLC 18772376, available on microfilm


• Kohlmeier, Louis M.; Udell, Jon G. and Anderson, Laird B. (eds.) (1981) Reporting on Business and the Economy Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey,
  ISBN 0-13-773879-X
  


• Kurtz, Howard (2000) The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation Free Press, New York,
  ISBN 0-684-86879-2
  


• 
  Pinkerson, Stewart (2011). The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire. New York City: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312658591.
  


• Tebbel, John William and Zuckerman, Mary Ellen (1991) The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 Oxford University Press, New York,
  ISBN 0-19-505127-0
  


• Parsons, D. W. (1989) The Power of the Financial Press: Journalism and Economic Opinion in Britain and America Rutgers University Press, New Jersey,
  ISBN 0-8135-1497-5
  

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Forbes.

• Official website