Long before Randall Lane climbed the editorial ranks at Forbes, he was a student journalist at Penn.
Known to his peers as a relentless reporter, Lane left Penn in 1990 with a degree in history and political science — and an unwavering ambition to make his mark in journalism. One year later, he joined the staff at Forbes, where he would eventually take the helm as the magazine’s chief content officer.
Lane was fired in July for accepting a $6 million payment from a firm with business ties to Forbes.
The payment — first reported by The New York Times — came from businessman RJ Shook, whose company has long partnered with Forbes to publish rankings of financial advisers. Shook reportedly made the undisclosed multimillion-dollar payment after selling his majority stake in Shook Research to PPC Enterprises, a private equity firm.
“Randall Lane’s acceptance of the undisclosed payment by RJ Shook was unacceptable and is inconsistent with our policies and principles of trust, transparency, and disclosure,” a Forbes spokesperson wrote in a statement. “No individual—regardless of title, tenure or contributions—is above those standards.”
After verifying the incident, the spokesperson stated that Forbes “took action and immediately fired Mr. Lane.” The company is “exploring all appropriate actions to hold Mr. Lane to full account,” according to the statement.
Forbes requires its employees to seek approval before engaging in outside business activities and prohibits them from profiting personally, directly, or indirectly, from the company’s dealings, according to a copy of the employee handbook obtained by the Times.
Newsrooms traditionally bar journalists from accepting payments or gifts from sources or business partners in order to prevent conflicts of interest or the appearance of one.
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Lane did not respond to multiple requests for comment. At the time of publication, it is unclear why Lane accepted the payment. A person familiar with his thinking told the Times that Lane considered the payment a gift in recognition of advice he provided Shook.
“I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for it,” Lane said in a statement last month. “I should have disclosed the gift, and failing to was a serious error in judgment. I deeply regret that, and I lost the job and team I love because of it.”
According to the Times, Lane acknowledged the payment after being confronted by Forbes. He was replaced on an interim basis by Kerry Lauerman, the magazine’s executive editor.
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At Penn, Lane spent his college career working at The Daily Pennsylvanian, rising to managing editor in 1989. Those who worked with him remember Lane as an ambitious journalist who was unrelenting in his pursuit of a good story.
Greg Stone — who graduated from the Wharton School in 1990 and served as the DP’s executive editor in 1989 — called Lane a “rival.”
“I knew Randall quite well,” Stone said. “We’ve served on the board together, and we were rivals at the time, in the sense that we both were gunning for the top job.”
According to Stone, Randall was “relentless, dogged, and determined” with a “definite reporter’s instinct and a storyteller’s appetite.”
“Randall would have loved to cover this story,” he added.
As a reporter at the DP, Lane found a niche covering crime on campus. Both Stone and 1989 College graduate Charles Cohen specifically recalled Lane’s 1988 reporting on a Wharton student convicted of drug trafficking in a million-dollar case.
“That was one of the biggest stories on campus, probably that year,” Stone said. “Randall was the guy who loved staying up late to get the best story possible.”
1991 College graduate Kevin Kassover — who served during the same DP board term as Lane — recalled that “he essentially lived at the DP offices.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he slept there!” Kassover wrote.
Out of those late nights, according to 1991 College graduate Hood Qaim-Maqami, came a peculiar tradition.
“Our air conditioning was just terrible back then,” Qaim-Maqami wrote. “Randall had been working late on a sweltering night before a major issue. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt and one the first years complained—perhaps with exaggerated seriousness—that Randall’s back hair was shedding onto the paste-up boards.”
A staffer “produced clippers as a joke” which resulted in a “quiet little tradition” where “Randall’s back had to be 'cleared for production’” before big nights at the office, Qaim-Maqami recalled.
In his experience, Cohen said that Lane has “always been focused on ethics in journalism,” adding that he was “really surprised about this latest turn of events.”
Cohen — who currently serves as chair of the DP Foundation — said he considers Lane “a close friend” and spent several years working with Lane during their time as student journalists at the DP. Both joined the newspaper’s Board of Directors after graduating.
“Randall has always been a risk-taker, which is why he’s so entrepreneurial in everything he does,” Cohen said. “I think that was part of the issue here: he was thinking entrepreneurially and maybe not thinking as much about the journalism side of his actions.”
Cohen described Lane as “one of the best investigative reporters that I’ve ever worked with.”
“He knows how to get to the bottom of the story, and then most importantly, he knows how to communicate the key facts in a way that immediately engages the readers,” Cohen said. “If you go to read Randall’s stuff in Forbes today, you can see the roots of it back in our college days. He was that good back then.”
Following his time as managing editor, Lane wrote a biweekly column titled “Missing Deadline.” In one January 1990 column, he praised the DP’s editorial independence.
He used the piece to describe a rival paper as “an unprofessional, noxious publication which blurs the lines between objective reporting and editorial biases.”
Staff reporter Kori Robinson and senior reporter Christine Oh contributed reporting.
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Randall Lane has previously donated to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. The DP, Inc. is committed to ensuring transparency with our readership regarding our funding sources. Accepting contributions does not imply endorsement of any donor or their products, services, or views. As an independent student paper and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that relies on donor support to sustain our operations, we remain fully committed to upholding our editorial independence from all external entities.
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Isha Chitirala is a News Editor at The Daily Pennsylvanian and can be reached at chitirala@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies economics and political science. Follow her on X @IshaChitirala.
