Forbes Fires Top Editor For Taking Undisclosed $6M Payment From Rankings Partner
Forbes's Pet Insurance Rankings Was Focus Of A 2022 TCR investigative report.
In 2022, The Canine Review reported that Forbes had removed its inaugural pet insurance ranking from its website amid unanswered questions posed by TCR about its methodology and commercial licensing.
Now, a separate conflict with similar underpinnings has emerged. at the top of the publication’s rankings operations. Forbes is confronting a new controversy involving Randall Lane, its chief content officer, who was dismissed in July because of his relationship with the research firm Shook that produces Forbes-branded rankings related to investment advisers, as first reported in The New York Times.
This week, The New York Times reported Forbes’s dismissal of Mr. Lane, the editor responsible for overseeing all of its journalism, after learning that he had received an undisclosed payment of approximately $6 million from R.J. Shook, founder of SHOOK Research. SHOOK has partnered with Forbes since 2016 to produce rankings of financial advisers and wealth-management firms.
TCR has not identified any relationship between Shook and Forbes’s coverage of pet insurance. Asked if the disclosure about Mr. Lane’s relationship with the company that ranks financial advisers has resulted in Forbes management reviewing its editorial leader’s relationship with any of its other ranking partners, including Statista, Forbes chief spokesman Bill Hankes did not immediately respond. TCR will update this story with any response from Forbes.
Although the TCR’s 2022 investigative report does not appear to have any direct connection to Mr. Lane’s firing, the TCR report essentially examined the same Forbes business ecosystem that is now at the center of new controversy: that Forbes lends its editorial branding to rankings produced by outside entities, which generate revenue from the people or companies that receive those rankings. In TCR’s 2022 story, the research firm was Statista.
TCR’s 2022 investigation involved more than one year of reporting and examined Forbes’s first “America’s Best Insurance Companies” ranking. In its “pet insurance” category, the publication named Embrace Pet Insurance the country’s top pet insurer. The ranking omitted Nationwide and Trupanion, then the two dominant carriers by market share, while placing PetPremium third—even though PetPremium was so obscure, even insurance industry leaders were unfamiliar with it. In fact, the company was no longer enrolling pets when the rankings were published.
Forbes and Statista said the results came from a survey of more than 16,000 consumers. But Forbes declined to provide the underlying data or even an adequate summary explaining the anomalous results. A Forbes editor working for Lane initially described TCR’s questions as legitimate “red flags” requiring a deeper review, then later said Forbes had determined that its data and methodology were sound.
As TCR completed its reporting, Forbes removed the pet insurance ranking from its website. A spokesperson said removing old rankings was customary when updated rankings were published, although no replacement pet-insurance ranking existed.
The 2022 investigation also documented how Forbes sold licensing rights to companies seeking to advertise their ranking badges. Embrace acknowledged paying Forbes after it received the top ranking, allowing the insurer to use Forbes branding in marketing and public-relations campaigns. The payment was not for inclusion, Embrace said, but for the right to promote the result after publication.
The Canine Review’s 2022 reporting documented the Forbes rankings-and-licensing machinery in which the Lane controversy would later arise—and raised questions about the separation of editorial judgment, outside research partners and commercial revenue that now look considerably more consequential.
“I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for it. I should have disclosed the gift,” Lane said in a statement provided to the Times. He said the failure to disclose the payment was a serious error in judgment and that it cost him the job and newsroom he loved.
The structural similarity matters: an outside research company produces a ranking carrying the authority of the Forbes name; Forbes publishes the result as an editorial product; and companies or professionals recognized by Forbes are subsequently offered paid ways to promote the recognition.
Mr. Lane, the editor dismissed last month for taking millions in personal payments from the research firm producing rankings about wealth advisors, was Forbes’s top editor from 2017 until his firing in 2026, so the entire pet-insurance episode occurred during his tenure as the company’s chief editorial executive. Although TCR’s reporting did not name Mr. Lane or establish that he personally participated in the Statista/pet insurance ranking, its licensing arrangements, or Forbes’s responses to TCR, Mr. Lane was copied on all email correspondences and was chief content officer at the time of TCR’s reporting.