PubSocially

Today David Ewalt, an editor at Forbes, live-tweeted a company meeting. In it Louis Dvorkin, the former CEO of True/Slant, which was recently acquired by Forbes, laid out a new bold strategy for Forbes. Here are the tweets (most to least recent):

Value for contributors isn’t explicitly defined yet. My own take: there will be both financial & non-financial rewards based on yr. audience

A couple people asking if this is HuffPo model — my answer would be no, it’s more entrepreneurial, about developing wide swaths of talent
If you are interested in writing about travel, real estate, wine, food, cars, sports, health –any forbes lifestyle topic– drop me a line!
Meeting adjourned! The big takeaway: If you have something smart or unique to say to the world, we’ll make it our job to help you say it
Reorganizational details tbd – this is more about philosophical direction
Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent. We will help you develop your own brand and talent
If anyone has questions I’ll try to ask it if you hurry.
Lewis calls it “incentive based entrepreneurial journalism.” This isn’t about trying to get people to give us content with no reward.
Forbes’ original reporting and investigation not going away. We’re adding a level 2 bottom of the pyramid: 1000s of outside contributors
The big idea: We are looking to significantly expand our stable of outside contributors. A merger of Forbes brand & the True/Slant model.
New Forbes edit boss Lewis Dvorkin having meeting right now with his editors. He says it’s on the record, so I’m tweeting from it live.

Seems to be a really courageous and I think effective new path for Forbes.

Interestingly Paul Carr later in the day let loose on TechCrunch about how foolish he thinks this strategy to be:

There are almost not enough words to describe how wrong-headed this move is: Forbes’ online editorial standards are already in the toilet and Dvorkin has just yanked on the flush. Not only will this new breed of hacks add thousands of pages of self-promotional, unedited (Forbes simply doesn’t have the resources to monitor thousands of contributors) drivel to Forbes.com but, by lowering the barrier to entry to anyone with a keyboard, the publication will also scare away those top tier contributors – captains of industry, statesmen and the like – who are prepared to pen a free article for Forbes just for the kudos that comes from being asked.

Today Newsweek re-launched its site with a new design. It’s great: simple & clear.

It’s funny how it’s very much a blog in its appearance, with a stream of stories. Two column.

More and more media are ditching their crazy, confusing layouts where they try to satisfy everyone in the turf-war for homepage space. Instead the simple two-column-with-stream layout pioneered by blogs will continue to take over more and more designs.

So how long until the New York Times ditches its 5-column zig-zag mess?

Mike Arrington wrote on TechCrunch today about the problems facing Digg and how it is struggling to get beyond its initial success to a greater scale. His point is that Digg is captive to its community and that the best companies often have to defy community feedback to take a service to the next level.

All good points. Maybe, however, there is simply a limit to the scale of a community. Arrington identifies the “250,000 or so hard core Digg users” as the heart of the problem. 250K power users as the problem?! Most sites would kill to have that many power users.

The problem with Digg is that it is one site, one service, one brand, one set of community leaders (Digg employees), one community, one vibe / ethos for all things. Within a community dynamic, you can only have so many big contributors, so many “traffic cops,” so much inter-communication among the community, after which it is no longer worth while and effective for more users to contribute.

A counter point: Facebook , Yelp, or Twitter, for example, have met no limits in the size of their communities. But the difference there is that they are not one single entity. Facebook and Twitter are endlessly segmented by friendships and follows. Yelp is broken down by cities, types of entities being reviewed, etc. And it ultimately has some sort of focus on business reviews.

Digg strives to cover all things, with all posts filtering up to the Digg home page. That’s ultimately one community, and it has hit its maximum.

The future of media is every more niche and more diffuse. Digg however is trying to an NBC or CBS. There’s only so much content that can be fit on a single channel or conversely, that a single community can contribute. But the future is going to have tens of thousands of channels or content communities, each run by leaders with specific knowledge and connection to each topic.

And that’s the problem for Digg.

Today CyberJournalist.net reported that The Nation re-launched its site. The headline: “The Nation launches new site built on Drupal, emphasizing community.” The Editor of The Nation posted too talking about how media is undergoing dramatic change and how “What we’ve decided to do is go for it.”

Now I don’t meant to belittle The Nation. They indeed are taking bolder steps into social media than most. But will this work? Let’s look at how they’re “emphasizing community.” Here’s their new site header:

Indeed you’ll see that there’s a new “community” link in the header. Here comes community, right?

Not really. Think of the big community sites: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. There’s no “community” link in the header. Community isn’t a side show. EVERYTHING is the community.

Furthermore, there aren’t different classes of users. There’s not the employees who can actually initiate and create content and then the users that can then do “community” reactive activities like liking and commenting.

If you really want user to participate, to build a “community,” then users have to be able to function at the top tier, and not just react to what the “pros” produce but produce themselves.

For media organizations to truly get going with “social media,” they need to take this next step.