The startup seeks a candidate who is an editor-in-chief at a top business magazine like Forbes, BusinessWeek, or Portfolio. All, mind you, based in New York. And yet he or she must live in San Francisco. Oh, and having worked at Yahoo, Google, or eBay is a "big plus." All of this to run a website targeted at "SMB" — advertiser jargon for "small and medium businesses." Most small-business publications fail to draw an audience, precisely because they think of their readers' businesses, contemptuously, as "small."

Too bad. In every other way, these guys are dreaming impossibly big. This job description is curiously similar to one posted in October with the same Gmail address as a contact. The main difference? The newer listing plays up the billionaire backers, and no longer mentions that it is "bankrolled by a respected 50+ year old offline company." A 50-year-old company? Sounds way too old media.

Here's the job listing:

Editor in Chief (San Francisco)

Date: 2008-11-18, 9:15AM PST

Calling all Business Editors

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

Please read the following requirements before replying to this ad:

Looking for a super smart, and bursting with energy senior business editor to head up content for a super-stealth new online company backed and funded by some legendary billionaires. We aren’t raising money, we don’t need VCs, and we are hiring!

IDEAL CANDIDATE

EIC or very senior level editor at a top tier online business site/publication. (Think BusinessWeek, Forbes, Portfolio, etc.) Someone who can build and manage a team, and above all— someone who knows how to create a unique voice and product by combining original content, RSS and other 3rd party feeds, bloggers and user generated submissions into something smart and fast-paced and directed to the owners and managers of SMBs. (If you don’t understand that term, this is not for you.)

NOT INTERESTED IN

People who do not live in San Francisco, Regional newspaper reporters, tech writers, marketing specialists, freelancers who have never managed a team or worked each day in an office. This is nothing against you in any way, but all about the specific focus and needs of this role. We need someone who knows SMB/SME readers and can fashion an innovative new online property for them, and who can work in our downtown SF office building a team.

Sound like you? Good, please read the official description. We are hiring immediately.

To apply, just send your resume and salary requirements to mavensource@gmail.com.

Editor in Chief

Confidential, San Francisco, CA

Well funded early-stage startup is seeking an Editor in Chief to join its senior management team and help launch and grow an exciting new online network for business professionals. This new company, bankrolled by a respected 50+ year old offline company and some very famous board members, will leverage the assets of the parent company, while creating a ground-breaking new online service specifically for business leaders. This is a ground floor of an exciting concept and major new product launch.

The venture is seeking cutting edge start-up veterans to make the vision into a marketable and scalable product quickly and effectively. Team members chosen for this opportunity will be entrepreneurial in nature, visionary, well versed in online trends and technology, and ready to take a concept to product in record time using the many assets of the parent company for content and market advantage. Leadership experience at top online companies like Yahoo!, Google, eBay etc. will also be a big plus.

Editor in Chief

Description:

The Editor in Chief is responsible for managing development, production, voice, and presentation of all online editorial content. The Editor in Chief will create and execute a new vision for presenting relevant business information and advice to readers in a rapidly evolving online environment, making the site a trusted and valued source for the SME business community.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and execute a comprehensive content vision, voice, and style
• Develop and maintain the editorial calendar, working with contributors to maintain freshness of content aligned with long-term vision
• Recruit and manage a team of freelance writers, staff editors, and respected contributors
• Edit all submissions to meet publishing standards
• Generate original content
• Continuously work with production staff on presentation and quality control
• Ensure all responsible parties – design, freelance and others – meet necessary deadline requirements
• Pursue deeper understanding of the information needs of readers and tailor content to fit these needs and interests
• Pursue reader submissions, as appropriate, to complement internally-generated content
• Occasionally attend business networking events as editorial representative of the company

Education, Experience, and Skills Required:

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in journalism
• Strong background in business publishing and business-focused content highly preferred
• Experience managing a team of writers and freelancers in an online media environment
• 5-7 years relevant work experience, including writing for respected print and online publications, reviewing and editing the work of other writers, and managing an editorial staff and budget.
• Candidate must demonstrate a creative mindset, enthusiasm for online media, and an understanding of business leaders’ issues and information needs

Location: San Francisco
Compensation: DOE
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
PostingID: 924129721

From: Steve Forbes
Sent: Mon 11/17/2008 2:20 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: News

We want to let you know of a series of structural changes that will enable us not only to better weather the current economic torm, but to move ahead quickly and profitably when the global economies begin recovering. These moves will make our company highly competitive in an extremely tough environment.

One of the benefits of Forbes is precisely the ability to move nimbly and swiftly to respond to our clients and marketers in the way they want to do business. For these reasons we have decided to change the organization of our sales and marketing groups in the company. In making these decisions, we got enormous and valuable input from our own people, as well as the marketplace to best position Forbes Media.

Over the next few weeks, the sales and marketing groups of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com will be combined into three specific units under the Forbes Media umbrella. The purpose is to enable us to more sharply and effectively focus our resources and priorities in response to our audiences and marketing partners.

The first newly organized sales and marketing group is the Brand Intelligence Group. It will focus on the senior-most levels of our marketing partners. We will create consultative engagements with these executives to better connect our highly valuable audiences with our advertisers' core communication goals. This vital enterprise will be led by Kevin Gentzel, as President and Group Publisher of Forbes Media. Bruce Rogers, Chief Brand Officer, will lead the marketing and research arms of this effort. The Integrated Solutions Group, another newly aligned sales and marketing unit, will work to create integrated and custom solutions to access our unique audiences. These original programs will be cross-platform, content-based, with broad marketability. The Integrated Solutions Group will be led by Mike Woods, as President.

As always, the core of our client outreach will be our geographically dispersed sales teams. Now, though, we will organize these teams in regional business centers, that combine the talents of the Forbes and Forbes.com sales staff in the newly created Forbes Media Sales and Service Group. This initiative will position the Forbes brand as a true multi-media vehicle. The marketplace increasingly recognizes the necessity to utilize —precisely and efficiently — several platforms to achieve their objectives. The group will be led by Avery Stirratt and Robert Pietsch, who will serve as Co-Presidents and Chief Advertising Officers. Debbie Himmelfarb will serve as Vice President, Marketing to support this group's marketing programs.

The leaders of the newly established groups will report to The Office of the Chairman, which will consist of Steve Forbes, Chairman and CEO of Forbes Media; Timothy Forbes, President and COO of Forbes Media; and Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com.

I want to thank the leadership of sales and marketing for their critical input in this valuable effort. We believe these bold moves will place us in a far stronger position to expand our historical lead in both print and on-line. In other areas of the company, the following changes will be implemented as well.

Conferences and events in the U.S. and Europe will now be part of sales and marketing programs.

Recently, the name of the overall brand of web properties and affiliated properties has changed to Forbes Digital. Included under the Forbes Digital umbrella are: Forbes.com; Investopedia.com; RealClearPolitics.com; RealClearMarkets.com; RealClearSports.com; the Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network; and ForbesTraveler.com. ForbesAutos.com will be discontinued.

We are also strengthening and expanding the editorial integration at both Forbes and Forbes.com. There has been a program to exchange talent between the web and the magazine in place for some time. These efforts have been successful, and we are in the midst of conversations to discuss ways to truly integrate the great talent in both organizations by sometime in early 2009.

In an age of Photoshop, Iran can have as many missiles as it wants; headlines can be faked; and bodies altered beyond any relationship to the real human form. But the problem of identity goes far deeper.

Stephen Glass, as a writer for The New Republic, created a website for a fake company, Jukt Micronics, for a story; Forbes exposed this lie, and countless others. But today, Glass might well have gotten away with it. Convincingly complete websites are easy to assemble. They don't even require human hands: Automated software cobbles together topical websites from republished copy scoured from the Web to trick Google into giving them free advertising revenue. And someone looking to hide their identity can now use proxy services to register domain names anonymously.

For that matter, the Internet's domain-name system — the root of all online identity — is dangerously vulnerable. Earlier this year, security researcher Dan Kaminsky found a nearly fatal flaw that would allow hackers to hijacks visits to website and redirect viewers to alternate ones. That flaw has mostly been fixed, but who knows what other ones await discovery? By tricking the systems which route a request for a domain name — nytimes.com, for example — to the right server, a troublemaker might not just fake up a headline, but an entire alternate version of the Times online.

Trust for media, old and new, continues to decline. Readers demand speed, punishing sluggish outlets by withholding their attention. Celerity replaces seriousness as a measure of authority. Who said what? Can you believe it? And does it matter, as long as you were the first to know?

Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy, who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader, which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last. Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?

(Photo by Jeff Jarvis)

• Forbes.com superstar Lacey Rose will move to Los Angeles and will take the lead on the magazine's Celeb List.
• Scott Woolley, L.A. bureau chief, is moving back to New York to run a team there.
• Betsy Corcoran, who runs the Forbes.com team in the magazine's Silicon Valley bureau, is stepping back from editing to do more writing — but some in Forbesian circles think she might be interested in ousting Quentin Hardy, her replacement as the magazine's Valley bureau chief, as head of the combined print and Web operations in the Valley. Corcoran says, "No, no, no. Wrong."

Our tipster adds: "Please don't buy this bullshit about how nice things are between print and dotcom."

The ongoing intra-Forbesian unpleasantness aside, one big question looms over the coming reorganization: Who's going to run the whole show. Churbuck thinks Bill Baldwin, the magazine's editor, is brainy but clueless. Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment, insiders say, is just a "puppet" of the publisher, Jim Spanfeller, and Maidment's contract is up soon. We have a suggestion: Why not just make Bono, the rock star turned venture capitalist at Elevation Partners, editor-in-chief of the whole shebang?

How should I know? I work at Forbes. I'll be the last to know.

I'd heard rumors about .com getting a floor here, but rumors like that circulate all the time and never come true. If they did, we'd belong to Fox, the magazine and website would already have merged, we'd all be in one building Queens and Joe Nocera would be running the operation. I personally doubt Valleywag is well sourced here.

There are also rumors about Spanfeller making a power grab. But what else is knew? Those rumors have been around since he arrived. Sometimes they're true, sometimes not. Or perhaps sometimes he succeeds at getting more power and sometimes he doesn't.

I think the move might be true, and it might involve some shift in power, but the idea that there's a dramatic consolidation in the wind is almost certainly wrong. But that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.

I do think putting the two staffs in the same building would do a lot to get print writers writing for the web and web writers writing for the magazine. But this is already happening. Maureen Farrell and Andy Greenberg both write for print, and Brian Caulfield had a cover. Nathan Vardi (print) did a list of the world's most wanted fugitives for the web. Mike Maiello just went from the magazine to the website.

If they do take over a floor of 60, I hope they bring their free coffee with them.

Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes.

What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

Almost every American in the upper income brackets uses a computer to access the Internet and has a cell phone or other mobile device. Among the six-figure income set, time spent on the Internet now leads all sectors of media consumption, including television. They spend over 23 hours online a week, with the wealthiest spending the most time online and watching the least television.

Only 40 percent use a mobile device to access the Internet. The number goes up to 57 percent when you reach households earning over $250,000. On average, the wealthy connect to the Internet 26 times per week via a computer and nearly 18 times a week on a mobile device, making a total of around ten purchases a week online.

What are they buying? Plane tickets, hotel reservations and event bookings, followed by women's wear, books and menswear. Only 10 percent of mobile Internet users make purchases with handhelds, mostly placing orders for takeout from restaurants.

Email, maps, weather and news are the primary online activities, with Google topping the list of preferred search engines. Watching video, publishing online or reading RSS feeds aren't very popular, with only 12 percent watching television online and 9 percent keeping a blog. Nearly 30 percent, however, read a blog, and 72 percent share photos.

So for advertisers and entrepreneurs looking to tap into a demographic with disposable income, you'd be correct in looking online instead of on television or radio. But instead of getting fancy with iPhone apps, try finding something real-world to sell them.

(Image from Ipsos Mendelsohn)

Publisher Hal Goldstein says that despite 20 million Windows Mobile phones sold in the past year, there's not enough of an ad market for Windows Mobile. Microsoft and cell-phone companies aren't willing to spend on ads in the mag. Moreover, he says, today's smartphone makers aren't like the old PDA companies — think HP — who were willing to bundle a magazine with their products. Goldstein has obviously sniffed out an iPhone accessories ad market to replace his no-longer-subsidized Pocket PC coverage.

Earlier today, users of the microblogging service were convinced Obama had picked Bloomberg. The Twitter users who got word of the real pick heard it through, yes, a Twitter account reposting CNN's story. Why didn't the campaign just direct people to sign up for CNN's breaking-news alerts? Those seem faster.

Roger W. Neal, senior vice president and general manager of BusinessWeek Digital, said that as Business Exchange pages work their way up through search engine results, the site should double BusinessWeek’s traffic on the Web within two years, allowing it to sell more ads.

There you have it, bluntly, from a senior BusinessWeek executive: Business Exchange is a search-engine spam trap, meant to capture Google users on their way to actual information. What makes the plan brilliant: In the short term, ad salespeople will sell these pages at BusinessWeek.com rates, raking in a fortune on throwaway content. In the long term, though, BusinessWeek risks turning all of its online inventory into junk by association.

(Photo by Chester Higgins/The New York Times)

The Times's San Francisco-based technology editor, Damon Darlin, is recruiting for two positions to write stories on technology, some of which will only appear online. In print, the appetite for tech stories among the Times's stable of luxury advertisers is limited. Online, tech brands are begging for more Times-quality pageviews to advertise against. Two questions: First, how will that change the meaning of "All the news that's fit to print?" Second, will the Times be able to convince reporters that "online exclusive" reporting is no longer a second-tier career?

Not all attempts to make wordcraft measurable are sensible. Under Sam Zell, Tribune newspapers are counting words, coming up with the laughable result that Hartford Courant reporters are worth more than their counterparts at the Los Angeles Times. The last thing publishers should be doing is setting up systems that reward the mindless gushing of words. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, pays writers a set monthly fee, with a bonus that varies with the number of pageviews their items generate.)

The Bloomberg way — "first word, future word, factual word, fastest word, final word" — emphasizes speed and accuracy in evaluating its reporters. (Some aspects of the news operation's culture may be shifting under new editorial leader Norm Pearlstine, but it's hard to see those basics changing.) News has value when it is actually new, and helps Bloomberg's customers make money.

And for all that, Bloomberg News is a relatively small part of Bloomberg's value proposition. Far more important are the prices that Bloomberg's terminals flash across traders' screens. News stories, in this scenario, are just one more commodity.

Not all journalism lends itself to such coldhearted analysis. Political reportage is a vital public service and, in the absence of local newspapers, it is hard to imagine how it will get funded. (Ironic that Michael Bloomberg, the company's founder, is now New York's mayor.) But it's hard to understand why business reporters, of all people, complain when their chosen career is treated like, well, a business. Merrill Lynch's pending sale of its stake in Bloomberg points to a future when the news is worth more, and those who write it, only as much as their last story. Depressing? Only to journalism careerists.

Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career.

Mr. Felker’s magazine was hip and ardent, civic-minded and skeptical. It was preoccupied with the foibles of the rich and powerful, the fecklessness of government and the high jinks of wiseguys. But it never lost sight of the complicated business and cultural life of the city. Articles were often gossipy, even vicious, and some took liberties with sources and journalistic techniques.

The big tech pubs have been shuffling their A-team players lately. Steven Levy jumped from Newsweek to Wired. Dan Lyons left Forbes to replace Levy at Newsweek. Forbes is now doing some high-end poaching of its own. (Can we vote for Brendan Koerner?) And the New York Times is staffing up for battle with the Wall Street Journal. Here at Valleywag, we heard that perpetual hanger-on, WSJ book reviewer, Wired kibbitzer and Bono impersonator Paul Boutin was being pulled into interviews for some of these big gigs. Paul, we told him, why bother? No matter where you end up, every single article you write will be 100-worded and openly mocked on Valleywag. Why don't you just finally join the team and post the stuff yourself here? Cracked Boutin, "That seems easier." He starts July 1.

The back story: Boutin and I met 11 years ago when we were both working at a dotcom called HotWired, a long-forgotten online offshoot of Wired. He emailed me asking for schwag from Suck.com, the site on which I worked; I left stickers and postcards and every other sort of branded giveaway on his chair, from which he was invariably absent. We eventually managed to meet — our door-desks were only 30 yards apart, after all. From those virtual beginnings came a fine bromance, and any number of coconspiratorial collaborations. Over the years, though, we never managed to draw a paycheck from the same place at the same time.

Until now. While he's contributed to Valleywag in countless ways since its inception, his work has always been tempered by employment obligations elsewhere. No more! At last, Paul's all ours — which means, gentle readers, he's all yours.

Boutin's not the only one signing on for more. Alaska Miller, one of our more vociferous commenters, is joining us as a summer intern. And while we're sad to lose calendarist Dianne de Guzman, who's starting a master's program in journalism at the University of Southern California in August, we're happy to have found a replacement, Adriana Nunez, who will pick up her duties starting in July.

I am about to take a big leap into a new and exciting career.

Starting mid-June I will be the director of marketing and business development at Matrix Partners.

It will be an amazing opportunity to work with a top-tier, 31 year-old firm with a history of stellar returns, and is a great way to leverage my research/networking/relationship building skills.

I am thrilled to be joining such an impressive team. Matrix has helped build a number of tech leaders, including Apple, Sandisk, Veritas, Alteon, Aruba and JBoss. The firm currently has $2+ billion under management, offices in Silicon Valley and India, and is headquartered in Waltham, Mass.

Matrix has a solid reputation and is looking to increase its emphasis on the West Coast. I will be based in the firm's Sand Hill Rd. office.

My primary responsibility will be to investigate new areas of investment. I am hoping to discover and reach out to innovators in multiple sectors, including green tech, consumer Internet, digital media and software-as-a-service. That means establishing new relationships with entrepreneurs, executives and other industry experts to collaborate with them to solve business problems and unearth new investment opportunities.

So, for all you entrepreneurs, innovators and industry leaders out there: Let's do lunch!

All that said, I will be sad to leave Forbes. I have loved my ten years at the magazine and Web site, and have built many life-long friendships. It has also been a great learning experience and career opportunity for me. I am going to miss the place.

For those of you also considering new directions, a little inspiration:

"Begin doing what you want now. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake."
-Marie Beynon Ray

It wasn't the interview with now-former CIO Douglas Merrill, which served to convince me that the Canadian-nice Merrill will get eaten alive by the music industry. It wasn't the moment when Jim Killeen of Cobe, Ireland, a Catholic priest, argues the Pope's position on human sexuality with Jim Killeen of Denver, Colorado, the swinger and self-described "tranny chaser."

It was a few minutes into the film when noted Scientologist and Earthlink founder Sky Dayton makes an incongruous appearance to muse on the business of moving bits. Later on, the filmmaker Killeen intereviews his schizophrenic brother and sister about their experiences with psychiatrists and the medications they're currently taking, proclaiming that he feels they'd be better off without psychiatric care. Finally he declares on camera that he's a Scientologist, confirming my suspicions based on Dayton's appearance and the anti-psychiatry agitprop.

But that's just a side note in a watchable and somewhat entertaining but otherwise forgettable documentary. The best moments are the man-on-the-street interviews where people from around the world describe their own experiences running a vanity search for their name on Google. But it doesn't succeed on the same, earnest level that 24 Hours on Craigslist did, probably because what it has in geographic scope it lacks in range of characters as subjects.