Spanfeller Media Group, which plans to launch a series of new sites, is close to finishing a funding round that I’m told will total around $2 million. Backers include RRE Ventures, Greenhill SAVP, SoftBank and Lerer Media Ventures.

Once the deal is done, sources say, Spanfeller’s plan is to roll out a series of industry-specific “verticals.” First up: Food.

Aren’t there plenty of food sites out there already? You’d think so, but Spanfeller and his backers figure there’s room for more. After that, they have a list of categories to tackle, with the exception of five they think are overpopulated: News, business/finance, entertainment, traditional sports and technology. Spanfeller declined to comment.

When Spanfeller left Forbes last summer after eight-plus years at the site, his initial plan was to create a sort of repair shop for established publishers’ Web properties. That made sense, given that that’s essentially what he did for the Forbes family when he took over their Web site in 2001. But the new plan is to create stuff from scratch.

Within the Web publishing industry, Spanfeller gets lots of credit for moving Forbes.com from also-ran status into one of the biggest finance sites on the Web. And he gets a fair amount of derision as well, for both a blustery style and a lusty embrace of page views. His most infamous gambit, used more than once: A slideshow detailing the world’s “Top Topless Beaches.”

But the collapse of the last tech bubble and the realization the Web publishing economics require lots and lots and lots of scale have brought many other Web publishers much closer to Spanfeller’s tactics than they’d like to admit. His new challenge: Re-creating that scale with brand new properties.

Dvorkin’s old company tried to build a platform for free-lance bloggers, paying each contributor a small per-piece payment based on traffic and other goals (here’s Walt Mossberg’s review of the site, from 2009). Forbes COO Tim Forbes, whose company owned a 20 percent stake in True/Slant, tells me the publisher will use True/Slant in some way. But what he’s really buying here is Dvorkin, who had previously worked for the magazine in the late 1990s before heading to AOL (AOL).

“I’m tremendously excited to have Lewis come aboard as chief product officer. That’s the core message,” Forbes says. He adds that he hadn’t thought he would buy True/Slant when he brought Dvorkin on to overhaul his Web site and magazine this spring, though it seems as if the idea didn’t come completely from out of the blue. “It wasn’t planned because we didn’t know how things will play out.”

All right. So how’s Forbes Media doing, anyway (disclosure: I worked for Forbes for 10 years)?

Okay-ish, Forbes ventures. He says his family company is still looking for a “very senior executive” to fill the place of Jim Berrien, Forbes magazine’s former publisher, and Jim Spanfeller, who ran the Forbes Web site. That job search, which has been running since last summer, is for a single position.

And the business itself? “Business improves,” Forbes says. “The world heals, and we’re seeing real improvements in order flow. Things are getting better.”

Here’s the release:

Lewis Dvorkin to Lead All Forbes Editorial Areas as Chief Product Officer

The Company to Acquire True/Slant

New York, New York (May 25, 2010) – Forbes announced today that it had agreed in principle to acquire True/Slant, a unique, web-based, news platform company. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant will be joining Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as Chief Product Officer effective June 1.

Mr. Dvorkin started consulting with Forbes in April of this year. He had been Executive Editor of the Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000. In his new capacity Mr. Dvorkin will be creating and implementing many new initiatives in the editorial product and the engagement of Forbes’s audiences. He will be charged with re-architecting the Forbes.com website; redesigning the magazine; and will assume responsibility for all editorial product across Forbes.

In making the announcement Tim Forbes, President and COO said: “These times demand new models for delivering information and engaging audiences and for the ways we run our business.

“Lewis Dvorkin, a seasoned journalist (including a previous stint with Forbes), a business entrepreneur and founder of True/Slant, and a social media pioneer is the ideal leader for Forbes editorial vision and products at this stage.

“Forbes mission and message will not change. There will be new opportunities for people inside Forbes; new opportunities for audiences to have a deeper relationship with Forbes; and new opportunities for marketers to engage with our important audiences.”

“To participate and lead Forbes into its next stage of media life is truly exciting,” said Mr. Dvorkin. ”Forbes is a trusted brand with deep and specific meaning to those interested in information that inspires and enables them to succeed and to create wealth.”  He continued, “With all of Forbes’s great experts, the wealth of Forbes data, and its real-time web features, we have a unique ability to stimulate the social media conversation. Our journalists, producers, audiences, marketers and all variety of entrepreneurs will be engaged as they never have been before with one another. Forbes is stepping ahead of everyone on this one.”

Mr. Dvorkin brings to this new position thirty-five years experience in both old and new media platforms. Besides his years at Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times. After leaving Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL, where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.

Forbes Media encompasses Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, the #1 business site on the Web that reaches on average more than 18 million people monthly. The company publishes Forbes and Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of more than 6 million readers. It also publishes ForbesLife and ForbesWoman magazines, in addition to licensee editions in China, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Turkey.

There’s nothing newsworthy in this memo, sent out last week in the wake of Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller’s departure. There’s no staff-shuffling detailed, and no grand strategy revealed. It’s really not much more than a “keep your head up.” But things are dour enough these days that even that counts for something, I think.

The sun has risen. Another day. We kick on. Our audience knows little and probably cares less about our internal organization. What they do care about is that we continue to serve them with indispensable journalism in that forthright, robust way that is our hallmark.

The late Jim Michaels liked to say that a Forbes story made readers richer or smarter. Smarter, certainly, about the world around them and understanding the choices they’ll be facing; smarter at running their business and career; smarter at investing, and smarter at enjoying the rewards of success. But a Forbes story can also make readers richer in spirit, heart or mind. Richer/smarter remains a good lens to look through at all we do.

We celebrate entrepreneurism all the time, and we should look for that same spirit in ourselves. You don’t need me to tell you that our industry is changing beyond all recognition, both in its forms and in the business models that pay for it.

We now compete for the time of busy people with a whole range of new competitors with an equally broad range of journalistic standards, approaches and ways of paying for what they do. Now more than ever, we need to be flexible and open to how we think about our journalism, and to question past assumptions about how we work — holding fast to our core principles and never putting the trust our audience has in us and our brand at risk — but being ready to experiment with how we create and distribute our journalism.

Not every one of those experiments will work. We shall have to be disciplined in measuring their relevance and usefulness to our audience, and bury our losers while cultivating our winners.

As at every publication, there are serious constraints now on our resources, but there are no restrictions on our imagination, enthusiasm or editorial entrepreneurship beyond those we impose on ourselves. We all still have to do our day jobs, make sure our audience is served in the most forthright way we know how with great journalism, and help support a business underneath it all to pay our salaries.

I learned long ago that there is nothing like robust cash flow to support robust journalism. We shall still have to set priorities for what we can take on, but I am sure I speak for [Forbes magazine editor] Bill [Baldwin] and all our senior colleagues when I commit to do all I humanly can to get as many of the best of your new ideas in front of our audience as we can.

We are a publication across all our media for people in business, rather than a business publication, which lets us range wide in what we cover an how. We now have a broad audience comprised of many overlapping sub-audiences, but all seeking in various ways that Forbesian voice, insight and timely wisdom that we offer.

We need to stay relevant to every one in a changing and challenging world. So let’s kick on with vigor and imagination to make as large an audience as we can richer and smarter however we can. ‘Cos that is what we do. And our audiences deserve no less.

[Image credit: Eye of einstein]

Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications. In April, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio, its business magazine and Web site, after a very expensive two-year run. Earlier this week, publisher McGraw-Hill (MHP) announced that it was shopping BusinessWeek, and observers are floating the notion that the company may end up giving the magazine away to anyone who wants to take on its annual losses.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune magazine has also been battered by the recession, which has been particularly hard on the finance, auto and luxury-good companies that business publications have traditionally relied upon. And Forbes itself has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since last fall.

In a memo to the company’s employees, Forbes CEO Steve Forbes praised Spanfeller for building out the company’s Web property, which says it receives 18 million unique visitors a month.In the aftermath of the dot.com crash, Spanfeller helped turn Forbes.com, which the family-owned company was close to shutting down, into a powerhouse.

But Forbes’s plan to take the Web property public earlier in the decade never panned out. And once Forbes sold a 40 percent stake to private equity investors Elevation Partners three years ago, plenty of Forbes employees, including me, had speculated that Spanfeller would look for a job that promised a big payout. That said, it wasn’t that long ago that Spanfeller was the victor in a power struggle with Jim Berrien, the former publisher of the Forbes print edition.

The news was first reported by AOL’s Daily Finance. Here’s the company memo from CEO Steve Forbes:

To: All Hands

From Steve Forbes

July 16, 2009

Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com has decided to step down from leading our website after nine years. In the entrepreneurial spirit that Forbes has always championed, Jim will be setting up his own media management company.

Describing his future plans Jim said, “The world of media has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and the velocity of the change promises only to increase going forward. I’ve had a great run at Forbes and have been deeply involved in the breakthroughs and transformations between traditional and digital media.  Now I see a huge opportunity to have my own media management business that will help other traditional media companies make the most of their enormous prospects in digital venues, taking all I have learned here in the past decade and applying on a wider horizon. Forbes.com has truly been a truly wonderful ride and I am deeply in debt to the Forbes family for letting me be a part of it.”

Jim has done a monumental job of bringing Forbes.com to the lead position in business websites, and secured Forbes.com as the must visit site for not only global business leaders but also anyone interested in the finest business reporting and analysis available. At present Forbes.com has 18 million unique visitors a month.

Along the way, Jim has overseen the development and growth of Forbes Digital, which includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com, RealClearMarkets.com, Real Clear Sports, and Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network, which together reach 40 million unique visitors a month.

This immense growth on the digital side of the business was spearheaded, pursed, and led by Jim with enormous success. The digital world is still uncharted with few rules, and Jim’s intellect, creativity, and business acumen helped bring us our number one position. For this the Forbes family is very grateful and we wish him all the success in his future plans.

Since Elevation Partners partnered with Forbes three years ago, Jim has worked very closely with them on the growth and development and vision for Forbes.com.  Commenting on Jim’s departure, Roger McNamee of Elevation said, “Jim did a fantastic job leading Forbes.com. In an era when competitors feared it, Jim embraced and evangelized the internet, with huge benefits to Forbes and its audiences. We are grateful for his contributions over the past nine years.”

Jim will be staying through a transition period at least through Labor Day. Please join me and my brothers in wishing Jim all the best in the future, which he deserves.

“In the end, in attempting to ‘do no evil,’ Google has done exactly that. I say this not just as someone running a content site but also as an end user. If this inequity of support continues along these lines, we will see a continuing destruction of our journalistic enterprises–enterprises that are one of the core building blocks of our democracy. Last year, while addressing the magazine publishers and editors of the MPA at the Google Campus, Eric Schmidt suggested that the Web was a ‘cesspool’ and that it was up to the major journalistic brands to clean it up. Well, Eric, in a great many ways, Google has helped to create that cesspool, and as such I would hope that it can be part of the solution.”

– Forbes CEO Jim Spanfeller

Last year MediaMemo made some intemperate comments about paidContent’s “Future Of Business Media” conference.

But I am happy to say that I don’t have any complaints about this year’s event. (OK, I do–the Wi-Fi’s been a bit spotty.)

But lots of good speakers and thoughtful questions. I look forward to checking out Rafat Ali’s paidContent reporting to catch up on the sessions I missed from this morning.

But I can tell you about an amazing event I saw this afternoon–an optimistic magazine publishing executive, who didn’t appear visibly drunk or otherwise intoxicated.

Here’s the quote, in its entirety, from Condé Nast publisher David Carey, who was part of a panel on business magazines: “We’ve talked to a lot of clients who are surprisingly bullish about their ad spend next year.”

“Who’s that”? Forbes.com publisher Jim Spanfeller immediately asked. But David just smiled.

Remind me to follow up with Carey on that next spring.