Forbes publisher will be going public with a merger with a $630 million dollar valuation. There has been a wind of media companies consolidating and Forbes is doing it by merging with Magnum Opus Acquisition Ltd (OPA.N), a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Forbes will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FRBS.

CEO Mike Federle will remain as CEO but new board members will be elected.

SPACs raise funds in an IPO with the purpose   of merging with a private company, which then  will go public. Magnum raised $200 million in a March IPO.

The deal lets Forbes  further capitalize on its digital transformation, Forbes Global Media Holdings said.

Other news media outlets also joined forces with a SPAC deal, such as BuzzFeed which agreed to a blank-check merger in June. Vox Media is also looking into  such a merger.

The Forbes company had a valuation of $475 million when Hong Kong-based investor group  when it merged Whale Media Investments bought a majority stake in 2014.

Forbes Magazine was founded in 1917 by Bertie Charles (“B.C.”) Forbes, a business columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain. The magazine was the only major business magazine in the United States throughout the 1920s. By 1930, two business magazines had joined the world of news publication- Business Week and Fortune. In  the 1930s and into the 1940s, Forbes magazine’s circulation numbers were falling behind its competitors. Working with his father, Forbes’s son Malcolm S. Forbes made many  changes in the mid-1940s , widening circulation, hiring a staff of writers to work exclusively for Forbes and starting the Forbes Investors Advisory Institute, an investment-advice service.

In 1982 Forbes launched the famous “Forbes Richest 400,” a list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

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