Inside Forbes: Introducing the Follow Bar, News Navigation for the Era of Social Media

Forty years in the news industry has taught me a simple truth: journalism is about the people producing it, the audience consuming it and the brand that connects them. Yet most digital news experiences are now firmly in the hands of content management systems and algorithms. Big news sites stack 150 or more headline links on a home page. They rely on algorithms to feed related headlines (they really aren’t) to static, look-a-like article pages. Editors, reporters and news enthusiasts remain confined to time-honored silos. The result: homogenized news products that lack authenticity, individual voice and brand personality. This is not a recipe for success in the era of social media.

 For 95 years, FORBES has been about entrepreneurial capitalism. That clear, unwavering mission is at the core of our exciting new platform. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


For two years, FORBES has been building a unique news platform. It harnesses technology to make it easy for qualified voices to publish content, program their own pages and engage with audiences. We’re reinventing how business news is done, placing our authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience. We have 1,000 journalists and topic experts putting their stories through the FORBES prism — free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism, smart investing and the rewards that come with it. They’ve attracted 30 million monthly consumers who appreciate the freedom to be full participants in the news process. Many marketers, experts in their own right, have joined our news conversation through our AdVoice program. Admittedly, organizing 500 posts a day (nearly 100,000 last year) has been a challenge. Discovering our quality content that’s right for you is not always easy.

Today, we’re taking a giant step to make our social and inclusive approach to news far easier to navigate, personalize and consume. We call it The FORBES Follow Bar. It’s a persistent navigational device at the bottom of our screens that enables you to organize and track the news. You can follow our reporters and writers covering news beats that interest you; the topics and subjects you most enjoy; the people, places, companies, sports teams and colleges on our popular lists; and our AdVoice partners. Or, you can choose to let our experienced editors — not algorithms — make programming choices for you. The FORBES Follow bar is about forming a more personal relationship with the news and those who bring it to you.
How does it work? Adjust your eyes downward a bit and you’ll see a series of up to 10 images at the bottom of your screen. Our pages are dynamic, which means what I see may be different from what you see. If you’re a registered user (you created a FORBES account or signed up with a social account) and already follow someone or something, you’ll see representative thumbnail photos. Roll over the photos and you’ll get recent headlines (usually within the last 15 minutes). If you’re a registered user who isn’t following yet, or you haven’t signed up for a FORBES account, the images you see will be channel specific and selected by one of our editors. This post is in the Business channel. The Technology channel will have a different set of images.

To the far right of the images you’ll see promotions for editorial feature content, headlines for posts from our AdVoice partners, and messaging about new FORBES products. Click the What’s This link if you would like additional details about The FORBES Follow Bar. Andrea Spiegel, who runs our product team, will give you all the particulars.
The FORBES Follow Bar isn’t all that’s new today. At the top of the screen, beneath the horizontal ad, we’ve introduced a new persistent “header.” The grey bar follows you down the screen, making it more convenient to navigate to a new Real Time page, a new Most Popular page and all our lists and videos. Click the FORBES branding to reveal a drop-down menu with stories selected by our channel editors and producers. At the very bottom of our screens is a new “footer.” Editors and producers program that in real time, too.
And there’s still more. Near the end of June, we’ll release new home pages for desktop, tablet and mobile users. Just like The FORBES Follow Bar, our new home pages will make it easier for you to navigate and personalize your experience.
Forbes.com is a business news experience unlike any other. We’re a curated network of expert content creators. It includes full-time editors and reporters with more than 1,000 years of experiences. We also have freelance journalists, authors, academics, topic-specific experts and business leaders who publish as contributors. We carefully vet them all. We hire, incentivize and pay hundreds of them. Hundreds more find rewards in association with our brand. Staffers and contributors alike use our state-of-the-art publishing tools to build individual brands on our platform.  The FORBES brand is the glue that holds them all together.
We’re weaving individuality, transparency and community into every thing we do. A photo brands each and every content creator’s page under their name. Staffers and contributors moderate their communities, “calling out” remarks that move a conversation forward. A called-out commenter’s avatar appears beneath the headline in a social comment strip. The FORBES Follow Bar adds yet another social layer of relationships to our screens. We’re evolving into a social operating system for business news users.
FORBES is a 95-year-old traditional media company with a startup mentality. Our digital news platform draws authority from the content and brand power of FORBES magazine, which itself draws expertise and understanding from 1,000 content creators and 30 million consumers. The two work together to extend our brand in exciting ways to journalists, consumers and marketers.
Our technology prowess is gaining momentum, too. In two years, we’ve built a sophisticated platform that combines fast-and-easy publishing tools, an elegant promotional construct of templates and functionality, and a real-time data feedback loop that sits at the core of everything we do. There is much more coming in the months ahead, with a special focus on our forum for discussion.
We hope you enjoy what we’ve built and feel inspired to join our news conversation by following our reporters and writers. As far as we’ve come, we know we have a long way still to go. FORBES is disrupting the traditional media model for news in every way. We’re on the path to building a sustainable model for journalism in the digital era that unites our traditional values and standards with the dynamics of digital publishing. We’ve certainly made our mistakes along the way. When we do, we listen, we learn and we take corrective action. Every day, we talk about how to get better, how to infuse more quality in everything we do. That’s just what you do when you’re changing the world.