U2 rocker Bono has taken a major investment in Forbes Media, and the earliest returns from the blogosphere are mixed.
David Carr reports in today’s New York Times that Elevation Partners, Bono’s private equity group, bought on Friday “a significant minority stake” in the company, which includes the flagship 89-year-old print magazine and a Web site, Forbes.com, that would appear to have a much brighter future. A conversation with Elevation managing director Roger McNamee, Carr writes, made clear “that his group was buying into a Web site with a magazine attached, as opposed to the other way around.”
With Bono increasingly known for his advocacy work on global trade and poverty, his “investment in a magazine that celebrates wealth and consumption,” says Carr, “is bound to raise eyebrows.”
Raymond Nize is skeptical for another reason, writing, “What really makes this transaction interesting is that Bono appears to be one of those save-the-world types and we really haven’t ever heard him make a coherent economic statement, even though he does make lots of economic statements.”
“It seems as though celebs owning chunks of the media is the hot new trend. First Robert De Niro almost bought the New York Observer, then Kevin Federline and Britney Spears threatened to start their own magazine, and now Forbes is selling off 40 percent of their company to Bono,” observes Jossip, which perhaps should amend its “hot new trend” to “celebs almost owning chunks of the media.”
“Basically, nobody really cares about the magazine anymore,” Jossip adds, “but since this Internet thing is still kind of hot, Forbes thought maybe the forward-thinking folks over at Elevation could make them relevant again via the Web.”
Tim Ferris is the only blogger thus far to welcome the deal with open arms (“Odd as it may appear on the surface, this is actually some very exciting stuff”), while two other Web scribes have lengthy posts noting Forbes’ missed opportunities.
“[W]hy did the venerable Forbes institution decide to sell a stake in itself now, after all these years?” asks Joe Weisenthal at DealBreaker.com. “Well, remember what they say about first sons as CEOs. Yeah, Steve really hasn’t been a good steward of the family fortune. Two extremely expensive failed runs for president didn’t help, nor did the effect that changes in the media have had on the print magazine business. So does this mean that we’ll get to see Bono appear on Forbes on Fox, giving his forecast for the market?”
Meantime, Om Malik notes that the sale price of up to $300 million, “while a bit of a whopper, is nothing close to what the Forbes family could have gotten in the 1990s bubble.”
“The news of the sale,” Malik adds, “brought back some fond memories from the early days of Forbes.com, when just a handful of us helped launch the Web site, and worked endless hours to turn it into a legitimate news source. Many of us have gone to bigger and better things in life, but it was something special. Forbes.com very quickly became a news source that inspired a movie [Shattered Glass] and helped bolster online media’s reputation.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.