What if I told you that Forbes Marketplace, the affiliate company operating on Forbes.com ALSO had agreements with CNN and USA Today?
If you haven’t been following the Forbes Marketplace story, read my first post here. For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to this company as just Marketplace.
Now, if you poke around the majority of CNN Underscored, it looks like a standard affiliate site. And as far as I know, it’s run by CNN itself.
In this case, the email is under wbdcontractor.com. I assume that Warner Bro Discovery (the owner of CNN) uses this domain for all contractor emails. So this person isn’t an actual employee, they’re a contractor.
Now this particular person I found is a Lead Editor, not just a freelance writer where a contract relationship would be expected. An editor has a lot of influence over the content, especially a Lead Editor. If it was me, I’d want all my editors as employees, especially for a brand like CNN.
Also, all the Money “employees” are separated from the rest of the Editorial staff on the CNN Underscored About page. They’re under a separate list called “Money.” Curious.