David adds: When I spoke with DVorkin last week, he denied that there were any sale plans, saying only that there “developments” around True/Slant’s raising of a second funding round. He also said that his work with Forbes involved only a small amount of his time consulting with an investor, and that T/S was still his full time job. But now that everything is out in the open, he felt a bit freer to talk late this afternoon about what he would be doing when he takes on the role of Forbes’ chief product officer a week from this Thursday.

“How often does one have the opportunity to take a brand like Forbes into new areas,” DVorkin said about the offer he couldn’t turn down. “I became an entrepreneur when I started True/Slant and and I consider the chance to reshape Forbest to be a huge entrepreneurial effort in itself.”

While he wouldn’t say who would lead T/S as he takes on wider responsibilities and he didn’t say whether T/S would remain as a standalone or become a channel within Forbes.

He did say he feels that Forbes’ purchase of his site is a realization of trends he was trying to buck in the content business, namely the rise of so-called “content farms” that pay freelancers very little for hastily written posts designed to drive keyword searches.  “You have a race to the bottom, where someone’s brother is in Iraq, all of a sudden, this person’s an expert on what’s going on there and feels they can report authoritatively,” DVorkin said. “On the other side, you have high cost quality content, that’s often very bureaucratic and inefficient. What we’ve been able to do at True/Slant is bring together freelance contributors, along with paid staffers and expert contributors to create a model that better reflects the capabilities and demands of the web. Forbes has all three of those groups, and we’re scale the model we’ve created at True/Slant into something that combines the best of the old ways and the new.”

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Lewis Dvorkin to Lead All Forbes Editorial Areas as Chief Product Officer
The Company to Acquire True/Slant

New York, New York (May 25, 2010) – Forbes announced today that it had agreed in principle to acquire True/Slant, a unique, web-based, news platform company. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant will be joining Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as Chief Product Officer effective June 1.

Mr. Dvorkin started consulting with Forbes in April of this year. He had been Executive Editor of the Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000.  In his new capacity Mr. Dvorkin will be creating and implementing many new initiatives in the editorial product and the engagement of Forbes’s audiences. He will be charged with re-architecting the Forbes.com website; redesigning the magazine; and will assume responsibility for all editorial product across Forbes.

In making the announcement Tim Forbes, President and COO said: “These times demand new models for delivering information and engaging audiences and for the ways we run our business.

“Lewis Dvorkin, a seasoned journalist (including a previous stint with Forbes), a business entrepreneur and founder of True/Slant, and a social media pioneer is the ideal leader for Forbes editorial vision and products at this stage.

“Forbes mission and message will not change. There will be new opportunities for people inside Forbes; new opportunities for audiences to have a deeper relationship with Forbes; and new opportunities for marketers to engage with our important audiences.”

“To participate and lead Forbes into its next stage of media life is truly exciting,” said Mr. Dvorkin.  “Forbes is a trusted brand with deep and specific meaning to those interested in information that inspires and enables them to succeed and to create wealth.”  He continued, “With all of Forbes’s great experts, the wealth of Forbes data, and its real-time web features, we have a unique ability to stimulate the social media conversation. Our journalists, producers, audiences, marketers and all variety of entrepreneurs will be engaged as they never have been before with one another. Forbes is stepping ahead of everyone on this one.”

Mr. Dvorkin brings to this new position thirty-five years experience in both old and new media platforms. Besides his years at Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times (NYSE: NYT).  After leaving Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL (NYSE: AOL), where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.

Forbes Media encompasses Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, the #1 business site on the Web that reaches on average more than 18 million people monthly. The company publishes Forbes and Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of more than 6 million readers. It also publishes ForbesLife and ForbesWoman magazines, in addition to licensee editions in China, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Turkey.