For the last 22 months, FORBES has been aggressively building a new, sustainable model for journalism as technology continues to disrupt the media and advertising industries. We now have 1,000 content creators -- staff reporters, authors, academics, topic experts and business leaders. They all use our tools to publish content and establish their individual brands on our platform. We are a disruptive force in our own right.
What struck me about the headlines (see below) was their variety -- and that each felt very appropriate for the writer's individual brand as well as the larger FORBES brand. In our model, staffers and contributors are accountable for their headlines, their posts and the moderation of comment streams. I like to say we carefully "edit talent." That means we vet contributors for their experience, knowledge and passion for specific topic areas -- just like we do our reporters and editors. Then we give them the liberty to publish content in their area of expertise with highly customized tools that provide for greater creative freedom. We're building what I call The New Newsroom. It doesn't require a traditional journalistic hierarchy to manage the flow of content onto our Web site. Even without the oversight, these headlines and posts -- 11 of them from contributors -- just feel right.
The FORBES network of writers produced nearly 100,000 posts last year. I certainly can't say that every day looks like this on Chartbeat. We've had our disappointing posts, including a doozy or two, as I talked about in this post, The Joys and Challenges of Being a Disruptor at a 94-Year-Old Startup. We learn from each headline miscue or problematic post. Sometimes the solution is process. Other times, human. In some instances, we find the answer in technology. Fortunately, we can always count on a market-correcting force of 1,000 content creators who collectively take great pride in the accuracy of our site. In a social media world, our 30 million monthly users are there for us, too. As participants on our platform, they are more than eager to educate us and to point out errors.
We're connecting new editorial management and technology systems for a new model. We're not relying on stop-gap solutions for classic journalistic structures that are just not practical, efficient or economically viable in a digital era. The clarity of the FORBES brand is also vital to the workings of our New Newsroom. We're about free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism and smart investing. That's the prism through which our staffers and contributors look at events they write about. As they develop ideas and then post, we offer our support: a producer desk helps with the journalism and mechanics of our system; a data-based audience development mines the Web's many information ecosystems to help connect writers with interested readers; a content team offers training in headline writing, libel law and other areas; and a group of experienced editors is ready to provide story guidance when asked.
Editorial excellence remains at the core of what FORBES is about -- online and in print. Audiences have standards for quality, too. Digital consumers are voracious. They value timeliness, relevance, transparency, perspective and analysis. They seek information -- and lots of it -- from all types of credible and knowledgeable sources, not just journalists. The perfect sentence, the perfect paragraph, the well-crafted story is not high on the digital news consumer's agenda. They do value accuracy, but understand digital media is fast, that news unfolds at a chaotic pace. If you make a mistake, fix it. If your information is thin, add to it. The online audience is forgiving if you work with them to do your job.
Print is different. It's a lean back experience. It's permanent. There is a beginning, a middle and an end to each story and, of course, the magazine itself. For that reason, we have experienced editors who pore over every word, every sentence, every paragraph and design every page. We' now have a system that enables 22 reporters and other staffers to fact check every article.
Journalists started to think of themselves as a professional group in the early 1900s. It was the beginning of the industrial media complex. Over the years, many of us, including Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University and an astute media observer, believe something "went awry" that led to a loss of confidence. As Rosen sees it, "The press got out of alignment with its public, and mistaken ideas that weren’t seen as mistaken prevented self-correction."
The FORBES contributor network -- in fact, the entire platform we're building -- opens the world of journalism to credible topic experts that newsroom gatekeepers previously kept out. The new participants include our audience, which has doubled in the last year, to 30 million monthly unique visitors (as measured by Omniture). They're following our reporters and writers -- on Forbes.com, Twitter and Facebook -- and clicking on all those headlines that keep me riveted to my desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile phone.
