(Credit: Forbes, screenshot)

According to a recent Mashable report, Forbes.com “authors, whether on staff or freelance, write their own headlines” and “press the public button themselves” and “no one edits their work. No one verifies their facts.”

Forbes‘ chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin is quoted as saying:

“Quality in a magazine is different: it’s about beautiful pages, great writing. It’s very well fact-checked and edited, you can’t fix it.  Quality in the digital space is about timeliness, relevance, community. When things need to be repaired online you can do that.”

Mashable noted that the self-publishing has back-fired, such as in a May blog post about Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg that prompted calls of sexism.

We have written a couple times recently about Forbes‘ unpublishing phony stories.  This spring, Forbes unpublished a story based on an April Fools prank and a story based on a blogger’s prank story that Abraham Lincoln tried to patent Facebook.

In 2010, Forbes said it would fact check an article on Barack Obama after publication following complaints by the media and the White House, as we wrote at the time.

Hat Tip: Mathew Ingram