Jim Spanfeller on How to Make a Forbes List | Big Think

Jim Spanfeller on How to Make a Forbes List

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The CEO describes how he creates those lists you love to read.

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James J. Spanfeller:

James J. Spanfeller serves as President & Chief Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and as Executive Vice President of Electronic Publishing for Forbes, publisher of Forbes, the nation's leading business magazine. As CEO of Forbes.com, he oversees all aspects of the strategic and operational management of the company. He is the first person to hold the position of Executive Vice President of Electronic Publishing at Forbes, a position created in recognition of the driving need to link all elements of the company's business to the Internet. In this capacity, Mr. Spanfeller develops and oversees joint opportunities for print and online across all areas of Forbes.

Prior to joining Forbes, Mr. Spanfeller was President, Consumer Magazine Group of Ziff Davis Media, Inc., the largest technology publishing company in the United States. The titles under his responsibility were PC Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, Smart Business, Family PC and Expedia Travels. He also managed Corporate Sales and Custom Publishing and was on the company's Board of Directors. He joined Ziff Davis Media in 1996 to launch Yahoo! Internet Life, as Founding Publisher, and oversaw all aspects of the business, including editorial, circulation, production, marketing and advertising sales. This magazine launch was one the most successful in the last decade, and the publication now has a circulation of 1.1 million. He also had direct supervision of the magazine's Web site, which attracted over 4 million page views a month. Before working at Ziff Davis Media, Mr. Spanfeller was Publisher of Inc. magazine, and he has also been Senior Vice President, Marketing/Associate Publisher of Playboy Enterprises Publishing Group, which owns and operates Playboy Magazine. Prior to this he held senior sales positions at Newsweek.

Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union College, Schenectady, New York. He sits on the Board of Directors of The New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship To At Risk Youth (NFTE); served as Executive Director of The Magazine Publishers Association, 1999-2000; and was named one of Folio magazine's "40 Industry Visionaries" in 1999. Mr. Spanfeller lives in New York City with his wife, Peg, and their three daughters.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What makes a good Forbes list?

Spanfeller: Well, I should say a lot of things I guess, right? There’s a wide variety of list and I think fundamentally people like list and so there are lists that would be outside the Forbes brand and there are lists that are inside the Forbes brand. So, it’s a good Forbes lists is something that’s inside the Forbes brand but also has a wide degree of interest. So, certainly rich people you know or US wealth list in our worldwide billionaire’s list and then individual country list who do quite well all around the world. But any if you’re getting into specific types of things you know, most expensive houses, most expensive city you live in sometimes negative list work, worst automobile of all time was a big list there for awhile and sometimes we… we’ll get a little bit of a little fun with it and we’ll do the highest earning cartoons or fictional characters. I said cartoons because Scrooge McDuck is usually the number one list on that list. And then we will do our top earning dead celebrities lists which we usually try to do on a Halloween, so that seems strangely appropriate.

Question: What is your methodology?

Spanfeller: We try to be very, very factual in how we do it. Obviously, when we get it to more humorous and whimsical for example fictional characters, there will in fact be a methodology behind it but that methodology is one that you know, sort of has a… but when they say in Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s kind of a lose guideline but other than that there’s very, very hard fast rules and before in fact for our celebrity lists and our rich lists, we have a very large staff working on those list all year around digging into individuals, digging into what they own, what stock they have, how the companies they’re invested with are doing and then other times where the list will be pulled out of either public place documents or census numbers or US government numbers or some other third party of some credible source who has issued metric in some way should be form.