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Is Forbes Becoming a Town Crier?
February 25, 2010 | 6 Comments
Forbes.com uses this Associated Press file photo of disgraced Congressman Jim Traficant to illustrate its comments about Youngstown.
Once known solely for excellent financial writing, Forbes appears to be heading the way of the Town Crier.
The magazine took another step in that direction last week when it published its latest Most Miserable Cities list, with Cleveland (No.1), Youngstown (18) and three other Ohio cities in the top 20.
The Town Criers are a chain of Ohio weekly newspapers, and about 10 years ago they birthed an intriguing idea. They decided to award the “best” businesses in their communities, in a range of categories.
The Town Criers published forms, about eight inches square and bordered by a dotted line, on their back pages for several weeks and encouraged readers to fill out the forms and mail them in for their favorite businesses. The businesses for which the most forms were received were declared the Town Crier Best.
Initially, being the best caught on. Merchants implored shoppers to mail in the Town Crier forms. Those who won proudly displayed their Town Crier Best plaques. Some put “Town Crier Best” in their ads or on banners.
Over time, though, being the best lost its allure. As it became common knowledge that some businesses bought dozens of Town Criers and had employees cut out forms, fill them out and send them in, credibility suffered. Readers and businesses lost interest.
In the last few years of that initiative, the Town Crier looked silly. Some of the restaurants they declared the best were ones I had never heard of. Sometimes really ugly home-made ads by merchants of lousy repute included the words, “Town Crier Best.”
Forbes doesn’t look quite that silly, but it’s getting there. The magazine now publishes more than 50 lists, many of them with questionable value.
In the early 1990s, when I left a news job to work at a public relations firm, I badly wanted to land our larger clients in Forbes. So I studied the book so closely I became obsessed with it. I got to know Forbes writers by their work and made inferences about the information we needed to get a client through that gate.
At a media relations conference in New York, a Forbes editor talked about how difficult that process was. The room was packed. I was fortunate enough during that trip to schedule a meeting with a Forbes editor at his office. I’ll never forget the high doors, soft carpets and stern faces. This was a news office, but it felt like a corporate law firm.
Despite our firm’s best efforts, we couldn’t get our clients in Forbes with any regularity or prominence. They were pleased to land small mentions now and then.
Today, some of the articles I see in Forbes look like rewritten press releases. There are some great reads, but also a lot of very, very light fare.
And tons of lists. Forbes has leveraged its popular Richest Americans list into lists of the wealthiest people in Australia, Japan, China and other nations, and that’s smart. The magazine has also expanded to lists of colleges and cities.
But line extensions have natural limits, and Forbes‘ list strategy has surpassed those. Its roster of 50-plus lists now includes the top-earning models, top-earning dead celebrities and best cities for singles. This ain’t the book it used to be.
Because of its knock on Youngstown and Cleveland, I was thinking of boycotting this latest edition of Forbes. But I’ve decided to buy one. I want to see if there’s a form with a dotted line border on the back.
Comments welcome below. Here are a couple other takes on Forbes’ latest list:
- Forbes Magazine is Worse Than a Dirty Lover; It’s Fickle (Plain Dealer)
- Get a Clue, Forbes (Hit the Trails blog)
Global warming is certainly not adding to the allure of NE Ohio as I look out my window on the second day of spring!
Comment by Matt Evans — February 25, 2010 @ 3:33 pm
Look at the other mainstream media attention Youngstown has received this year. The New York Times put out two articles about the city. The first was about the shooting of the 80 year old woman in the church parking lot and the second was about Traficant running fro office again.
We should be honest about the deep seeded problems still in Youngstown. We have another corruption scandal emerging as I type, once again it involves corrupt judges and the most powerful businessman in the area. Not to mention, we have already had three times the number of murders that we had last year. This city still has enormous issues to face-Forbes is not one of them.
Comment by Well... — February 25, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
Good point, Well.
Comment by Dan Pecchia — February 25, 2010 @ 4:20 pm
Your tweaking of Forbes is quite separate from the reality of life in Northeast Ohio. You make a compelling point about the relevance of their myriad lists. After a while, should we care?
However, when it comes to the misery index, cities like Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Canton and Toledo should take note, because Forbes’ opinions of them seem only to mirror those of many current and former residents. Canton had a population of 110,000 when I was growing up there, was last listed around 70,000, and, according to current rumblings, may dip closer to 60,000 on the next Census. That’s shocking. Rather than get mad at Forbes, we who live in NEO ought to take their observations to heart — regardless of their motive or tactics in disseminating them — and do something about the circumstances affecting our region.
Unfortunately “doing something” is often left to politicians — which is why our cities ended up on the list in the first place. No wonder so many people just throw up their hands and leave.
Nice post, Dan.
Comment by Tom Delamater — February 25, 2010 @ 5:56 pm
List articles have become the publishing equivalent of “reality” TV — totally lame, unbelievable and pointless content, cheap to produce, and attractive to consumers with more time than brains. Every time I read one of those list articles I kick myself all over again for getting suckered into reading it. What do you get when you average the inches of snowfall with the percent of unemployment, and the rate of violent crime and the emergency room wait time? No on knows for sure, but it sure isn’t useful statistical information anymore. It’s like baking a cake and then processing it in the cuisinart — something Marie Antoinette might have done if she had electricity. “Let them eat crumb-slurry,” she might have opined on her way to the electric chair.
Comment by Ron Petrie — February 25, 2010 @ 6:33 pm
I used to love reading Malcolm Forbes’s column, Thoughts From the Chairman, which always opened with a quote – “With all thy getting, get thee understanding,”. I thought that was great direction for the magazine’s writers and editors. Pity that they seem to have abandoned that charter in favor of the sensational, salatious, and silly. More pitiful is that so many consumers fail to recognize that factual information has been replaced by entertainment pap because the bottom line takes precedence over the editors’ red lines.Malcolm is likely spinning in his grave over what is now published under his name, however, the restaurant, show and hotel reviews which always closed his column, may have started it all.
NEO has some ugly warts we will never be rid of without first acknowledging they are there. If Forbes wants to help us do that, fine. However,if they just want to point at the wart on Grandma’s nose and laugh, they win a wuppin.
Comment by James Cartwright — February 25, 2010 @ 8:59 pm