Forbes undergoes radical overhaul

The magazine has been one of the loudest cheerleaders of entrepreneurial capitalism, a force that, through the Web, is draining profits from Forbes and the magazine industry as a whole.

Now Forbes is hoping “entrepreneurial journalism” can save it.

Along with a redesigned magazine that arrives on newsstands Friday, Forbes is constructing a vast network of bloggers, each expected to build their own personal audience and brand around a steady stream of Web postings and links to social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The hope is bring more traffic to Forbes.com and provide extra fodder for the print edition, which has been forced to cut staff because of a dramatic decline in advertising.

In doing so, Forbes is throwing out some of the old norms of journalism.

Many of these bloggers won’t have any background in reporting. Instead, Forbes is recruiting specialists to write on specific topics. And they won’t have a lot of immediate oversight. Forbes.com has gradually shifted to a blogging system in which contributors publish straight to the Web, rather than going through copy editing.

All this will boost the amount of material Forbes is able to pump out every day. But slapping the Forbes label on so many untested contributors also risks diluting a brand built up over more than 90 years of publishing. upside down,” Forbes said.