Dan Lyons with the read of the week.

This is the conundrum, but lately I’ve been thinking of a business plan that sounds like it could work. First you establish yourself as an “influencer” by posting a lot of noisy stuff on a blog and building an audience. Then you need to “monetize” your influence. You tell all the VCs in the Valley that you are starting an “angel fund,” and you ask each one to give you, say, $500,000. They go along because (a) $500,000 is pocket change to these guys — so small, in fact, that they don’t care if they lose every penny of it; and (b) you’re an influential hack and they don’t want to piss you off; and (c) they figure you can maybe write nice things about their portfolio companies, which would be especially useful if/when one of their portfolio companies gets caught up in some scandal; and (d) if any independent journalists write something critical about one of the VC’s portfolio companies, you can can use your influential personal blog to savagely attack those journalists and try to discredit them.

In today’s article, I talk with Lewis D’Vorkin, chief product officer of Forbes Media about the old brand’s move to open its platform beyond journalists and toward a mini-militia of contributors.

Forbes has a long history of being at the vanguard of the publishing world when it comes to the Web, rolling out Forbes.com in 1996, well before most magazines. Now, it’s in the midst of an even more radical shift, attempting to marry the best of the crowdsourced Internet publishing model with its professional content and premium brand. Doing so successfully will mean straddling the line between quantity and quality that has proven fiendishly difficult for many a publication.

Read the rest at Digiday to see how it’s working - from a numbers perspective and from a brand reputation perspective.

Art,

In your blog, you ask “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” Of course we should and we do. The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.

We do it every day, in a variety of ways. On the most ambitious level, we sometimes do entire stories that delve into campaigns to distort the truth. On a day to day basis, we explore the candidates’ actions to see if what they’ve done squares with what they are saying now — for example, this story about Newt Gingrich’s work for clients:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/us/politics/gingrichs-health-care-policy-history-at-odds-with-gop.html

A typical day-to-day example came in John Harwood’s Political Memo on Jan. 6, examining Mitt Romney’s assertion that Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” That may be an opinion or political rhetoric, but we supplied the context for readers to assess it. We pointed out: “The largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

We quickly called out Romney’s misleading ad that quoted Obama out of context on the economy:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/ad-watch-romney-takes-on-obama/

On the other hand, in Romney’s defense, we quickly explained in detail the true context of his “I like being able to fire people” quote — that he was talking about choosing an insurance company, not firing workers.

And of course, as you pointed out, we routinely have a team or reporters fact-checking debate assertions in something close to real time; here are examples:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/fact-check/

These are just a few recent cases. And providing facts to challenge false or misleading assertions isn’t just part of political coverage. We do it routinely in policy stories from Washington and business stories from Wall Street. We do it in science coverage, too — for example, we constantly point out the scientific consensus on climate change,

Of course, some facts are legitimately in dispute, and many assertions, especially in the political arena, are open to debate. We have to be careful that fact-checking is fair and impartial, and doesn’t veer into tendentiousness. Some voices crying out for “facts” really only want to hear their own version of the facts.

Could we do more? Yes, always. And we will.

Sincerely, Jill Abramson

Arthur updates the post.

Here’s a series of questions that no one seems to answer, so I’ll throw it out here:

Why does it take a rise in the polls for a candidate to be “vetted” by the media? Why doesn’t the media chase the story once candidate enters race? Would the political process be radically different if the public knew about a candidate earlier on during a race?

The third in a series of five underreported stories. Food prices have jumped almost 20% in the past year, affecting not just those who can no longer afford food every day, but those in power who cannot provide food. Foreign papers make the case that rising food prices trigger revolution.

The Guardian reported in July that these rising food prices are here to stay and how, ultimately, they affect the poor the most. And while it didn’t mention the increasing food rates as a cause of upheaval, The Australian didn’t pull any punches in this August article:

Rising food prices recently helped to trigger the Arab Spring, just as they played a role in the French Revolution and many others. Revolutionary ideas are all very well, but “a hungry belly has no ears.”

Food security, which has always been a source of anxiety for the poor, is becoming a global concern again. The term may be new but the concept is as old as famine. A few staple foods – bread or rice – and cooking oil account for most of the diet of the urban poor and most of their disposable income. This makes minor perturbations in price more critical than in the developed world. In 18th-Century France or 21st-Century Egypt, when food prices rise, people starve.

Read the rest of the entry at Current and find other articles about this topic, as well as some pretty interesting graphs from The Telegraph.