(Sounds familiar, and to be honest the pay is extremely competitive with the demeaning pittance I am paid here.) “Yeah, we don’t do this for the money,” he admitted. Zucker claimed each piece took him around ten hours -that’s over 140 hours for $1,000.
It’s a great Faustian bargain: Forbes gets fed troughs full of “content” every day (which begets clicks), and the “contributors” get ambiguously compensated.Īccording to former Forbes contributor Matt Zucker, five pieces of a few hundred words apiece in one month earn a writer $250 seven pieces gets $500.
Some 2,800 “contributors,” most of them from marketing and PR rather than journalism, post on the site each day for a pittance. It was all in good fun, I guess, but I couldn’t help wondering whether this grave error didn’t speak volumes about Forbes, which is now scrambling to find a new buyer, and the long-smoldering dumpster fire of its infamous “contributor network.” That’s also how HODL, for “hold,” came about-from a typo on a chat forum. Clearly, Hirschmiller had tapped into some primal urge for group-forming yet to be articulated by Indo-European phraseology.Ĭall it the “ Let’s Go Brandon ” effect: an explanation of a term or phrase so skewed that it becomes more popular than the original. “Large friendly gathering,” added another. The malaprop expanded infinitely as other Twitterers offered similarly benign translations. I once almost broke a fellow’s foot when I tried to shoehorn it into an E when the poor man clearly needed an EEE. Hirschmiller identifies herself in her contributor tagline as “a journalist and digital consultant based between Paris and London covering fashion, luxury and Web 3.0.” Elsewhere she describes herself as a “Footwear Authority Web 3.0 Expert-in-Training.”Īs something of a footwear authority myself (I make ends meet by selling men’s shoes in a local department store) I’m appalled by the shadow Hirschmiller has cast over our craft. She told me via Instagram DM that she googled the phrase and concluded that it's "NFT community speak" for "let's form group."Ĭrypto Twitter disagreed “LFG" is more universally understood to mean “let’s fucking go.” (It is also the favored rallying cry of NFL star and crypto promoter Tom Brady.) Cue the spit takes.
Was it a mistake, or was it providence shaping mankind’s destiny via lax editorial standards on the Forbes contributor network? The contributor in question, Stephanie Hirschmiller, stands by her translation. More importantly, this line midway through the article was immediately seized on by Crypto Twitter : “He signed off the tweet ‘LFG,’ the NFT community speak acronym meaning ‘let’s form group.’”
The story appeared under the headline, “Tiffany & Co Releases Those CryptoPunk Pendants And They Are Expensive, Here’s All The Intel.” There followed a rollicking article about the co-president of Tiffany and Co., Alexandre Arnault, boosting the market value of a series of CryptoPunk-themed pendants by way of a “guerrilla marketing campaign via his personal social media handle.”
As with every great meme that has graced this benighted civilization, it began with an elegant and moving story, captured in all its fleeting delicacy by a Forbes “contributor.”