Shallow journalism at Forbes magazine
When you see a business magazine story about blogs with the title "Attack of The Blogs!," you should know what to expect. A cover story in the latest edition of Forbes magazine doesn't disappoint as this paragraph indicates:
Context & Ripple Effects
This NevOn critique lands one day after Micro Persuasion's takedown of the same Forbes cover story for calling bloggers lynch mobs, and days before an open letter from Naked Conversations pressing the magazine directly. Together they mark the moment the business press first tried to frame the blogosphere as a threat story rather than a media shift.
The episode foreshadows a longer arc: Forbes itself later moved toward creator-style publishing with a paid newsletter program for its own journalists, while the tech-versus-media tension eventually hardened into the open conflict between prominent venture figures and the reporters covering them.
First-order effects
- Forbes takes an immediate credibility hit with exactly the audience it was writing about — bloggers and early adopters who dissect the cover line paragraph-by-paragraph within hours.
- The magazine becomes the case study itself: its own framing ('attack,' 'lynch mobs') gets quoted back at it across dozens of independent posts, amplifying far beyond the original print run.
Second-order effects
- Mainstream outlets are pushed to treat blogs as a subject requiring actual engagement rather than caricature, since dismissive coverage demonstrably generates more hostile attention than silence would.
- PR and corporate communications teams take note — as the GourmetStation fiasco shows — that mishandling blogger relations now carries real brand risk, accelerating demand for blog-literate counsel.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the gatekeeper model erodes not through replacement but absorption: legacy brands eventually adopt the formats they once mocked (paid newsletters, direct journalist-audience relationships), while the adversarial posture hardens into structural friction between tech power and press accountability.
The trend: Legacy media's relationship with participatory publishing moves from mockery to grudging engagement to outright adoption — with the underlying tension between institutions and networked critics never fully resolving.