maggie

the thing about evangelizing firefox is that there's a lot of talk about making sure the web isn't just chrome and keeping the web open, which is good and important, but also we lose sight of telling people about functionality that chrome doesn't have like:

• did you know that firefox lets you hold shift while right-clicking to prevent websites from hijacking the context menu

my legitimate favorite feature in firefox is the right click screenshot feature. cannot believe i ever lived without this functionality

You can donate to the Forbes Union walkout fund here—Forbes is allowed to withhold pay from those walking out.

Today is day three of the Forbes walkout, and one of the highlight demands of today from Forbes Union is an interesting one: editorial separation and standards. This is generally taken for granted and enforced in most of the news outlets you read—but Forbes is not like most of them.

As you may be aware, their website peddles quite a lot of stuff with absolutely no oversight from quite a lot of people with a financial interest in what they're peddling. This is an extremely direct consequence of the website's "contributor model", which is basically an independent contractor free-for-all. This model has also been noted as giving advertisers an uncritical editorial voice and has been criticized at length by journalistic outlets such as Nieman Lab. It's also a gigantic grift, although I'm sure you've picked up on this from the jump. Poynter noted in 2012 that the model was a huge boon for Forbes—it guarantees them a huge stream of content for cheap and turns the website into a content mill. They wrote then:

[...]few of the paid Forbes.com contributors can make a living there alone, and of course as independent contractors they have no health or retirement benefits

So, needless to say this is all a bit of a sore point for the handful of people actually employed at Forbes and not just independently contracted. And naturally most of them are subject to the same pressures and influences even when they work on the "more reputable" physical magazine side of the outlet. The lack of integrity obviously does not stop at the bounds of the website, it's just worse there than in print. But print is still a problem: the (apparent lack of) editorial independence writers have on the print side of Forbes has been raised as early and as publicly as 2017 in The Washington Post.

It's an open question of how much Forbes Union can fix this problem—particularly given how financially beneficial it presumably is to Forbes—but it is an important matter to be addressed. In blunt terms, editorial independence is a necessary component for journalism to not just be stenography for the worst people in the world.

Jean Aubertin
(website — ig@jean.aubertin — via)