Robert Charles Forbes

New Deer, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 1880 - 1954

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About MeRobert Charles Forbes
14 May 1880 – 6 May 1954
Founder of Forbes Magazine

As a child growing up in New Deer, Aberdeenshire, Robert Charles Forbes’s schoolteacher spotted his talent for words. Bertie, as he was known, was encouraged by this, teaching himself shorthand and launching his career as a journalist with the Dundee Courierin 1897. He went on to found Forbes magazine, which today remains one of the world’s most successful financial news publications, read by over six million people worldwide.

At the age of 24 Bertie set his sights on New York, which he described as “the greatest newspaper town in the world”. Armed with a growing interest in business stories and a burning ambition, he convinced New York’s Journal of Commerce to hire him as a reporter. Seven years later Bertie had gained a reputation as the most prominent business journalist of his time, becoming editor of the New York American. Bertie’s true goal was to publish his own magazine and in September 1917 he launched Forbes, profiling the “doers and doings” of the growing American business scene. The early editions of Forbes were written in large part by Bertie himself and proved a huge success, reaching a circulation of 100,000 by the 1940s.
Additional InfoImage attribution: Published by B. C. Forbes Publishing Company, New York, 1917, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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