Today Lewis Dvorkin, the founder of True/Slant, announced that his former employer Forbes is buying his nascent digital news operation, which launched in April 2009.
Forbes was an early investor in the site and will now be bringing True/Slant entirely into the fold.
Here’s Mr. Dvorkin writing about the deal:
The small True/Slant team, with more than 100 years of Web, publishing and TV experience, will now be working side-by-side with talented and dedicated journalists at Forbes Media. The goal: to work together to further develop a mindset around the power of the Web and traditional news values. With hard work, we can implement new blogging platforms and more efficient digital, print and video content creation models; we can find better ways for audiences to engage with news and information; and we can pursue new integrative approaches for marketers and advertisers.
Here’s Andrew Rice writing recently in The New York Times Magazine about True/Slant’s editorial mission and ambition:
One morning, as a March gale howled down Broadway, I visited the editors of the Web site True/Slant. Their loftlike office, in a vintage SoHo building, was bare, white and slightly chilly, as if designed to reflect the present ethic of austerity. With just five employees, True/Slant has built a significant audience since it started last year: about a million readers visit the site at least once a month, a number similar to the online following of The Village Voice or The Charlotte Observer. The site owes its modest but growing success to the work of more than 300 part-time contributors. It’s not so much a unified publication as a loosely connected commune of bloggers, who generate a continual stream of content with minimal editorial intervention. The company calls what it is doing “entrepreneurial journalism” and says it’s the future of the profession.
