Slashdot Mirror
PC World Editor Resigns When Ordered Not to Criticize Advertisers
bricko noted a story of our modern journalism world gone so wrong it makes me sad. "Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs." The link discusses that the CEO was the former head of MacWorld and would get calls from Jobs. Apparently he also told the staff that product reviews had to be nicer to vendors who advertise in the magazine. The sad thing is that given the economics of publishing in this day and age, I doubt anything even comes of this even tho it essentially confirms that PC World reviews should be thought of as no more than press releases. I know that's how I will consider links from them in the future. But congratulations to anyone willing to stick to their guns on such matters.
That's good, an editor or news outfit should never be swayed by an advertiser. Guess I'll go read Slashdot's Intel Opinion Center now...
Trolling is a art,
Well I'm glad to hear this at least. I do find it a bit funny that PC World is now skewed to Apple heh.
Does this mean the Slashvertisements will stop and you will actually start checking submissions? Never mind PC World, hooray for Slashdot!!
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
This is another example of how traditional media is dieing. It used to be that "the net" was a wild place of unfounded reports, biased reviews and slander. Now the print media has surpassed even the net, and it is slower! We are watching the desperate and terrified end of an era.
There is constant pressure in all organizations that make money from advertising to curry favor with your advertisers by being nice to them. If you've ever worked in media, you know there is like a demilitiarized zone between the editorial and the advertising department, and both sides deeply resent the other side for what they perceive as the others failure to understand their company mission.
It is a testament to how evil the ad people are that they really see it that way. The time when ads were a necessary evil and and the actual content was the important part is long gone, and we're trending more and more toward the content being nothing more than a lure for ads.
I never thought much of PC World, but I have to respect an Executive Editor who is willing to put his principles ahead of his job. Of course, now I think less of PC World because their damn executive editor had to quit because they put their whoring for ads ahead of the needs of their readers.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Dude, this is obviously a late april fool's joke.
Sincerely, I. P. Freely
I remember when John Dvorak got fired from InfoWorld for criticizing the Trash-80 when Radio Shack was one of InfoWorld's biggest advertisers.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I am interested in knowing if most major news outlets have this same sort of policy of journalists not being able to "bite the hand that feeds"
Good for him. Now start a blog!
As much as it is bad that corporations control (or at least influence) the media through advertising, it wouldn't go on if consumers wouldn't allow it to happen. If consumers would be willing to spend a little extra money on a magazine, or in general be just a little more critical of their purchases, companies wouldn't have so much power to misinform.
All the money that would be spent up front in buying magazines that are consumer, and not advertiser supported, would be saved when they bought equipment that was the best value for their money, instead of being overly hyped junk.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I don't really like it anyway, good enough excuse [shrugs]
Enjoy Every Sandwich
British computer magazines generally have much better editorial content than their American equivalents and don't seem to pull punches when it comes to reviews.
Borders and Barnes and Noble carry most of the popular ones.
To a large degree, this is why I don't read magazines with any objectivity in mind.
This guy just made the mistake of going against the grain. In magazines, you have the advertisers paying the majority of the costs associated with the magazine, and you write articles that glorify the advertisers.
But I'm glad this doesn't happen on the Internet or Slashdot, so I'm going to go over to the Intel Opinion Center now...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
There goes my PC World subscription (I considered it useless, anyways).
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Will they send the articles to the advertisers' public relations offices first to make sure the content of the stories is acceptable?
Yes, I know, I shouldn't give them any ideas. But if they're not going to be impartial in their reviews, they should stop calling themselves "media" and start calling themselves PR.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Why he didn't simply send a flame letter to Jobs and ask him for help?
839*929
(Also, I can't believe someone here has a PAID subscription to PCWorld; what a mark!)
Actually, this article brought up a question for me:
Who reads computer magazines, anyway?
Although I am not the most 31337 person in the world, I am pretty much surrounded by the world of computers, but I have never, in my life, put down money for a computer magazine. And no one I know, including many programmers, hardware people, or network administrators, seems to be a follower either.
But yet I see racks of these things at grocery stores. Who is buying these things? Middle management who want to keep up to date with the computer world?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
In the early Windows vs OS/2 days PC Magazine (different owner/publisher then) was guilty of bending its editorial views towards its largest advertisers. It was part of the reason that Windows ultimately gained momentum that couldn't be stopped. Notice I said "part of the reason", because it wasn't the only one by far. In more ways than one this is not news.
These tired, grade-school funny name jokes?
Sincerely,
Hugh G. Rection
A goal is a dream with a deadline
God I'm an asshole :)
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Magazines need to realise that it's the buyers who provide the money - They even provide the advertising money indirectly. The advertisers don't buy advertising because the want to magazine to do well. They buy it because they want to sell their product.
Sure, if the magazine says the product is rubbish, people aren't going to buy that specific product, but they might buy others. If you pull advertising they're not going to buy anything else either because they won't have heard of it.
R On the other hand, if the magazine loses the respect of its customers, they're going to stop buying it. Then nobody will buy advertising or the magazine.
Quite simply it makes no sense to give into the advertisers demands.
"I doubt anything even comes of this even tho it essentially confirms that PC World reviews should be thought of as no more than press releases."
I know it's old hat to complain about the poor quality of editing at Slashdot, but seriously now, "tho"? This is how my 13 year old little sister types in chat sessions, not how the editors of a semi-respectable news site read by millions should write news stories.
In this case, they can't even hide behind the defense that these were the submitter's original words and as editors they can't be expected to catch every little mistake (even though the editors of other sites that have even higher posting volumes like Engadget don't seem to have this problem). In this case, though, this is actually the editor's own words. For shame...
I'm guessing Digg won't hire him to handle their HD-DVD articles...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't think that the economics of publishing are to blame. Poor choices by management seem a more likely scape goat. Take for a counter example consumer reports. Although they are a non-profit, they manage to take no advertising and still fund tests of hundreds of cars every year. I also like that they do not allow products to tout how highly they were rated and they buy products to test anonymously. Surely this model could be applied to get unbiased computer reviews. That is if you don't think that consumer reports' computer reviews are good enough.
Phil McCrevice
I salute Harry McCracken for standing up for principle. It might not be the best decision for his own pocketbook or career, but our whole society needs more people like Mr. McCracken to stand up against this type of corruption in journalism. Cheers to you.
...for not deifying Jobs these days.
The video game industry has suffered from this for ages. No matter how crappy or buggy the game, it would get good reviews from the rags and web sites. The reason for this is that the gaming companies would threaten to pull advance copies of their next game if any game got a bad review. Since not being to review games would effectively shut down the site/rag, they piped down and played along. It's been going on with the auto makers for decades. Seriously pan one of the new line up, and see what you get to write about next year. The beauty products industry has also long operated along these lines. Write something less than glowing about their new shade of lipstick and see if you ever get another sample. The fashion industry is another example.
Now that this has become the "norm", I'm not surprised to see it spreading to other parts of the computer industry. So much for having a free press - guess that they're not really "free" after all if all you have to do is buy a few ads.
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
sounds familiar. Is he kin to "Phil McCracken"?
Now I like this guy, but he no longer has a job... anywhere.
p average scores from some of these sites are jokes. Yet people continue to claim that 5 is average? BS.
. floor.article.overall_rating=9&constraint.return_a ll=is_true&sort.attribute=article.overall_rating&s ort.order=desc this link which is all the 9s and above for the Xbox. If you've played most of these games you'll know they are in no way 9s or at least not as high as they are given.
Sorry people this is sadly the way the world works now and it sucks ass. Advertisers always get a good score, and everyone gets good stores unless you totally fuck up. Go to http://www.gamerankings.com/ http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/sites.as
But even more than that, I recently felt like checking out old Xbox games so I went to http://xbox.ign.com/index/reviews.html?constraint
A friend mentioned a good idea as a way to solve this, find a way to get reviews for games written 20 years after the game comes out, to see if the game really does stand the test of time, because otherwise you get this overly biased bullshit where advertising dollars affect the review scores.
The bottom line I've found is every review site and magazine is biased. It's just the simple fact of life that we have to understand when seeking out reviews and articles.
We don't get junk like that here. No siree! Anybody know when the next Roland Pick-a-pail story will be up? I'm gonna read that sucka'.
In a world where we have debates as to whether "sponsored" content on web sites needs to be marked as such, it's not surprising that this happened.
I have personally seen instances where the choice of the "of the day" or "of the week" featured product was taken out of the hands of Editorial and became a sellable placement without any disclaimer.
They call it "advertorial", but when it's not disclaimed as such, it's the death of editorial integrity. But when the competition is hot and heavy for ad dollars and you have popular competitors who are willing to prostitute their editors... you can't send your bank a note about your solid ethics in lieu of a mortgage check.
This might raise a small tempest in a teapot, and for a brief time create some editorial/advertorial transparency in response to the backlash. But that will merely be the same as a cancer that seems to go into remission.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I gave up my free subscription to PC Week and every other Ziff-Davis publication more than 15 years ago when they refused to publish anything critical of Microsoft. It was amazing how every PC Week laboratory test, Microsoft came out on top. Their evaluation criteria were always written with a Microsoft bias. In this modern era of corporate FUD and directors malfeasance, one must maintain a skeptical outlook.
signature pending slashdot approval
Back in the 80s and 90s I read and cherished every new issue of a certain home computing magazine (for a while I was getting two). But after the internet exploded, it seems quite pointless. There was a while there where I'd consider buying Dr.Dobbs, but then they became... boring (not to mention silly expensive in this part of the world).
I'm currently paying for GDM but delivered online. Not very convinient to read (in fact it's almost painful, with the whole issue being multiple layers of images (for "protection" purposes) all wrapped up in javascript), but a year /w all back-issues was very cheap.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
if this guy is related to the famous journalist Zak McCracken?
Well, here's a little bit of encouragement... whoever hires this guy as their new Editor-in-Chief will immediately get a good looking over as a candidate for my reading.
I doubt that he'll have a serious problem finding employment. There are a few editorial sites that atleast seem to be unbiased. http://www.hexus.net/ springs to mind, as I recall their editors blasted a vendor after a fight ensued over a negative product review. I also doubt that he has any serious need for corporate employment after 16 years at IDG. Also, his credentials will afford him the opportunity to have an independent blog and make some money from it. If anything I'm more likely to go read his material now than I ever was before. Kudos for ethics, regardless of how unpopular they may be. As for who reads tech magazines: my boss does, unfortunately he doesn't bother to ever accomplish any work because thats all he ever does. Personally, if all computer magazines were destroyed my life might be a little easier!
Typical mac cult bitches. Why don't you sorry pussies go shove a one-button mouse straight up your iCandyAsses.
..people are missing:
McCracken was a very long-time employee of PC World.
The magazine got a new CEO.
The CEO made a new request with respect to editorial policy.
McCracken quit in protest.
Which probably means he hadn't been cowering to the advertisers for the previous 11 some-odd years he worked at PC World.
[I was at a social dinner that Harry was at about a month ago, though I didn't speak with him much.]
The Romantic Times (a magazine with nothing but reviews of romance novels) has just this week been accused of exchanging favorable reviews for ad placements. So much so that it seems the magazine's publisher, Kathryn Falk, has been accused of influencing what one erotic romance publisher actually publishes, giving guidance and suggesting different book ventures. And then it gets weird. I don't mean to threadjack, but to me it's a coincidence that both issues come up in the same week. -posted anonymously, because I don't want anyone to know that I know about such things.
The Toyota Camry, Motor Trend's 2007 Car Of The Year.
Three cheers for across-the-board competence! Hip! Hip! Hooray!
Undue advertiser influence in magazine publishing is as old as the hills.
This sig intentionally left blank.
and hope he gets a good job at a reputable publication.
Almost the same thing happened to my local news paper when many key people at the paper quit over bias which was being pushed down from above by the paper's owner. It's been a long messy trail since then.
Start Running Better Polls
ANY site, channel, newspaper, magazine, or other that has advertising has a massive, massive conflict of interest when discussing its advertisers or their products. Slashdot's own Opinion Center, while not necessarily displaying any bias, still has a conflict of interest. That's why commercially-supported media is inherently dangerous. Even when it looks OK, it's still dodgy as fuck.
Doesn't it seem that media in generally has aligned themselves with advertisers more than ever before? It this just a symptom of the competitive market place of today's world where you can get information from so many sources? From the 300 plus channels on digital cable to the Internet we are constantly being bombarded with so many messages that people are tuning out 99% of them. Advertising seems to be moving from a distinct service such a paid for ad spot to being interwoven into the content as to reach the maximum number of people as possible in a world of constant and intense media chatter. The future for unbiased reporting does not look good unless people demand it.
Yeah, I'm looking at you, SYS-CON and Mark "don't tell anyone I'm Zenoss' bitch" Hinkle.
Where old Editors-In-Chief go when they die or tell the truth.
People act as if this is uncommon. I'm alarmed that people have reacted in this way.
It's very common.
I used to freelance for a large, well-known video game site (not hard to guess which -- there's only a couple). This was back when CD games were first introduced, and a lot of companies were experimenting by cramming as much video as they could onto a disk (with no respect to video quality, acting, and especially gameplay).
Anyway, a company came out with something particularly wretched. Basically some "video game" where interacting involved pushing an arrow key on your keyboard every 10 minutes or so while actors hammed it up. I bluntly gave the game the lowest possible score and walked away.
A few months later, I get an email from editor. The game's maker wasn't happy, and they were threatening to pull advertising from the online rag. Now, the editor didn't say "change the review". He just subtetly requested that another review "rereview it" to give a "counterpoint". That counterpoint would be provided by the editor himself.
Needless to say I wasn't happy, but this was a burgeoning new online rag and I didn't have much say as a freelancer.
However, ever notice when sites like GameSpot or IGN go soft on a review for a crappy game when that same company has front page splash rights (they cover the page in their company or game logo)? Now you know.
No, they most certainly do not. And neither did PC World ... until now.
What happened is that a tin-pot egomaniac named Colin Crawford -- who had been a senior vice president at IDG -- PC World's parent company, was made the new President and CEO of the group of publications that includes PC World and MacWorld. This happened in March 2007. Barely one month into his tenure, Crawford caught wind of Harry's story and the rest is history.
Seriously, the man is a complete tool and an example of everything that's wrong with the media business. Just try reading his blog, if you don't believe me.
You can count on pc magazine as being 'fixed' for good. From now on nobody will pay attention to any shit contained within it. And who buys something that contains no real stuff ? Me not.
Read radical news here
Reminds me of an old story about FOX news and Monsanto - although this one involves legal threats rather than advertising dollars, it shows (like the PC World story) how companies with money can distort the news. FOX News hired some reporters to be "The Investigators". When the reporters did a story critical of a Monsanto product, Monsanto started with legal threats. FOX decided to that they wanted to either rewrite the story to make it more Monsanto-friendly, or kill the story altogether. FOX even tried to bribe the reporters - part of that bribe involved the reporters not talking about the Monsanto story (including not bringing it to another news organization), not talk about the Monsanto product anywhere, and not talk about FOX' suppression of that story. Ultimately, FOX delayed and delayed the story with rewrites (83 versions) until they fired the reporters once a window appeared in their contract. Ultimately, they brought FOX to court, but appeals courts found that *falsifying news is not actually against the law*. (It's funny to hear some FOX news reporter's report at the end where the words are carefully chosen to make it sound like FOX was completely in the right, and makes it sound like the reporters were just making up inaccurate claims against FOX. When you control the news, you get to tell everyone how it happened, I guess.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RlAiTprpXc
Please, people.
I write for the Inq, and I have seen the whole paid for journalist thing crop up time and time again, although not at the Inq. I can say with certainty that if there was even an indication of this, anyone working for us would be thrown out so fast it would astound you.
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A while back when it got particularly bad, I wrote this up:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
And if anything, things have gotten quite a bit worse. It isn't the names you might recognize as much as tge power brokers behind the scenes, usually with a good chunk of site ownership.
All of the accused will blather on about firewalls between advertising and editorial people, but it is all a crock, usually worth the recycling value of the pixels it is printed on.
I have been offered bribes, both cash and other from people, but I have _NEVER_ gotten any pressure to change a story for content, although I have had edits made so we wouldn't get our asses sued off for libel/slander/whatnot. I agreed with these in the long run.
To put things in perspective, when I was in the process of ripping HP up and down, starting here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=1
I was at the last Comdex in the press room. I was sitting beside Nathan Brookwood and a CNet guy, and had written a particularly biting piece about HP/Carly (I forget which one, there were many). and I got an email from Mike Magee saying "HP wants to.....".
Needless to say, that was an asshole pucker moment. I clicked on it ready to call my lawyer next, and it read:
"....advertise with us.". I wrote him back and asked if it meant that I had to tone down the stories. I forget the exact wording of the response, but summed up it was "not a chance".
Basically, there are honest editors/owners/management and dishonest ones. The dishonest ones will lean on people to do things that they know better than to do. The honest ones will leave, the dishonest ones will stay, and you quickly get a dishonest organization. (As an aside, the same holds true for companies and PR)
Let me sum this up clearly, there are a LOT of rotten sites out there, and also a lot of good ones. The rotten ones are quite good at hiding/disguising their paid for status, you probably wouldn't recognize it if you saw it. Most people throw accusations of bias around as soon as they disagree with the conclusion a site makes, usually a fanboi-ish thing. This is wrong.
Where you get a lot of the bias is things like roundups of hardware that you can not get your product into if you do not have an advertising contract with the site. Hot samples that are not purchasable being overlooked if a banner ad is running prominently on the site, and other similar things. Things are bad out there. One great one is sites selling awards to companies, you know those logos gold/diamond/three thumbs up/whatever that you see on boxes, can be bought from a number of sites. Look for reviews where you see a mediocre review with a summation of 'Three Silver Starzzz!!!' at the end, and you can be pretty sure money changed hands.
There is also the good old fashioned sending of a review with a check, but that is less common now.
Basically, be skeptical. Read every review about a new release, and look for the one that stands out. Look for reviews that say 'kick-ass overclocking part' and the forum posts saying 'I can't get anywhere near that'. These are not 100% sure signs, but keep a tally, patterns will emerge.
In the end, things are bad. If you are moderately skeptical and have an IQ greater than a warm moist towelette, you will see the patterns. You are not imagining them.
-Charlie
Harry McCracken was editor-in-chief of a major tech mag supported by big advertisers. I find it hard to believe that Colin Crawford's suggestion was anything new. At most, maybe he was just more blunt about it than previous CEOs.
I'm sure there's a hell of a lot more to the story than an oh-so-noble stance by McCracken.
Listen-
A majority of the print out there, including reference resources that I refuse to name, are known as "Pay for Play".
There are companies out there who are heralded, yet refuse to write a word unless you provide them with things such as references, guaranteed space on the website, or guarantees for future business (i.e. we pay them "consulting fees" where the reality is all we do is agrue about the crap they are writing).
The best sites are the ones where user opinion is at the forefront and mediated by a set (more than 1)of industry experts that represent two or more sides.
Magazines like these are on lifesupport, and the only way that they turn or clear ROI is to whore themselves to the top companies of their respected sector in industry.
I for one appreciate the former editors ethics and would think that it wont be long before he is hired somewhere else. From this perspective, his value just went up 2 fold, and the company that hires him will benefit greatly.
As much as they want it to look like there's impartiality, it has not been the case for at least a decade.
n s that's bigger than running the operation out of your house, you can't say ANYTHING overtly bad, even if you stick to the facts. Let's not forget that review product is tested quite well before it leaves the office too. The chances that it's production equipment are slim too.
If you are a news/reviews-outlet-making-money-from-subscriptio
The ideal media source would buy something off the retail shelf and go from there. Which would result in high subscription prices, which consumers won't pay.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
RTFA. In this case, there was no direct pressure from advertisers. Colin Crawford, the President and CEO of PC World, claimed to get calls from Steve Jobs a lot while at MacWorld, but there's no evidence that he got one here. He just unilaterally killed the story in question. Harry McCracken didn't quit because advertisers wanted him not to run his story, he quit because his own superiors started dictating what content he could and couldn't run, for the sake of their sales plan.
Breakfast served all day!
Going by the coverage of Mac in PC world, they are filled with MS-shills. So yeah, now that they have an ex-MacWorld editor, their Apple bashing would reduce to a large extend.
Am sure the old guards that were used to slinging mud at Apple whenever they get bored will have now have to actually write a more balanced piece. And if some ass hates Mac so much that he thinks he can't do it, he should resign.
I say "Good Riddence..!"
We need more editor's who can give a balanced coverage to Macs, Windows, Linux and all other platforms.
There used to be a very expensive magazine named Gun Tests. (They might still be in business; I don't know.) They bought guns at retail just like normal folks then tested them, kind of like what some of the more trustworthy consumer groups do. Being a gun nut, I bought the magazine for a while but it was too expensive to continue subscribing.
The odd thing was that I learned for sure something I had long suspected; gun writers are mostly liars. They love every new gun lent to them for testing. If a gun is a real loser, the mainstream magazines would just decline to publish anything.
Gun Tests was different. They bought popular guns and showed them for the junk they were. The test were wonderful, authentic, and informative. It was exactly the sort of information you'd get from a trusted friend. The problem was that a single black and white only, rough paper, stapled magazine (we're talking just one step above a nice 'zine) of 24 pages or so cost more than 10 bucks, iirc. (And that was a long time ago.)
Which leads me to ask - Is it possible for a testing magazine that doesn't accept ads to be priced affordably enough to actually sell? Is it possible for a magazine that accepts ads to be honest?
Gun Tests had no ads but the cover price was a killer. The Absolute Sound managed combine ads and *seemed* to be objective back when I used to read it, a couple of decades ago, but I was never completely confident in them. Nowadays, I dunno. Does integrity exist anywhere?
Piss off the White House? Staffers return your calls a bit late or your sources dry up.
Piss off the military? Well your reports get indented with the folks washing Hummers in the transport park instead of with a section on patrol. So you end up sending home pictures of wet vehicles instead of action shots.
These ae the unwritten rules of the game that keep the media in check. The editors understand this and will discipline staffers who don't play ball.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Finally, someone with guts. If the print media had guys like McCraken, they may not be dying off. This is all about the First Amendment. PC World should not follow the gov't down the path of censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like "America Deceived" from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for magazines).
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)
Maybe Colin Crawford will hire the IT guys from Business 2.0. That'll stop any bad reviews for sure.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
...and fight the Alien Mindbenders again!
Or was that his brother Zak ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I dont know who ditched this post to -1 but it is entirely accurate.
My post is similar to this one and it is absolutely truthyful
IDG, the parent of MacWorld, PC World, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld and about 100 other variants and localized versions, has long published poorly written trash to serve its advertisers, not its readers.
For example: InfoWorld Publishes False Report on Mac Security
I got so tired of IDG, ZDnet, CNET and more CNET that I started writing myth deconstructions and realized that many of these writers not only know nothing about their subject matter, but also use a lot of words without any grasp of their meaning. My favorites are "proprietary" and "anecdotal."
What has really impressed me is that the power and reputation associated with IT trade magazines is really undeserved. There is so little information, they are so poorly written, and so full of gratuitious ignorance that it has been a bit of an eye-opener on the media in general. I once naievely thought that one needed qualifications in order to write. That is not the case.
This PC World isue simply offers more proof that IDG and other magazines have no credibility and just publish enough fluff to hold together their ad space.
Way back when I used to read and study kilobaud and it's big brother Dr. Dobbs. You could really learn a lot from those. Lot's of tutorials and interesting projects. Not unlike say Popular Mechanics used to be long ago. or How scinetific american used to have the amateur sceintist and the Martin Gardeners educational columns.
The current crop of mags is for imbeciles mostly. Occasionally they alert you to something you did not know. And perhaps the occasional feature by feature comparison of two (expensive) softwares is marginally useful.
Other than that. good question. Who does read these things? I get them mailed to me for free. Not sure why they do, but I suppose it's to keep up their circulation numbers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And is in cahoots with Intel? (Registered Trademark)
Far out!
Bless you ad blocker (probably also a Registered Trademark), bless you.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I do. I skim a half dozen news and article sites daily, have rss updates to tell me when the regulars put something out, but it isn't really serving the same purpose. When I pick up Linux Journal/Linux Magazine/Hackers Quarterly or one of the half dozen "free" newsletters and magazines that are sent to me, I know I'm getting two things:
A. I'm getting the advertisements that I actually might be interested in. I can't tell you how many times I've been shocked when somebody told me the price of their product, mostly because I'd seen so many ads in the magazines. It gives me a decent idea what something is worth and also an idea of what's available on the market. Yeah, ads clutter the world, but when I'm getting ready to make a purchase decision, I want a solid idea what is normal. I buy magazines that appeal to my interests or work and they tend to put ads in front of me that might come in handy. (We bought a SAN for $10K from a company I saw in a journal when the people that we'd been talking to were putting comparable storage around $175,000.)
B. Depth. Most of the things I read on the Internet are meant to be consumed in 15 minutes or less. That's what I want when I'm starting my morning or surfing, but sometimes I like articles with more meat to them. Yes, there are websites that do that, but when I'm doing that kind of reading, the laptop isn't as comfortable (and it isn't as upsetting when the magazine gets dropped in the toilet.) The editors realize that if I'm buying a magazine that I'm going to have for at least a month, they had better put something that sticks with me in front of me or they won't get any of my cash again. They tend to accomplish that goal, but then I only buy those magazines that do.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Why do we have to work from the assumption that every tech journal is perfectly unbiased? They aren't. No one expects them to be. No one expects Mom&Pop Router company to come out ahead in a head to head test with Cisco regardless of the relative merits of each. No one expects a magazine that touts itself as the expert on the corporate desktop to be in favor of Linux or Mac. And no one who's ad space is 3/4ths of the goddamn magazine to begin with EVER expects them to be vendor neutral any more than you would expect the editors of Cosmo to start bashing Cosmetic companies. The Editor who quit in a fury should remember that no one's hands are pure but we don't expect them to be. We really can in part form our own opinions about something. Or if we can't then it doesn't matter anyway and all products are the same.
won't be renewing my subscription.
That's what they used to call their advertising-review policy.
I can't say that they always followed it, but they seemed to take it seriously enough in the past. They wrote articles on it, and they were not afraid to give a half-star rating when warranted. And I remember they often gave one or two-star ratings to prime advertisers like Apple. (They used to use stars, not mice.)
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Mods, give this guy a +1 Funny. Now I gotta find that DVD and watch it again.
It's too damn hot for a penguin to be just walkin' around
Yeah - congratulations! You have your dignity... but no job.
I'd like to think I'd do the same thing, but since I've never been put in such a situation I can't really say. Which weighs more: my self-respect or my mortgage? Tough call. If I had a wife or a... what're those things called... child - that'd be an even tougher call. He's got his pride... but I've got a steak dinner waiting for me tonight. And plus, my self-delusion is a great substitute for any pride I may have sold.
Ever read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being?" I think I could say that I'd go from being a doctor to a window-washer to stick to my guns if the enemy were indeed an entire government. But if it's just a matter of advertising dollars, is it really worth it? Is it even possible to go through the entirety of life in the modern world without some kind of concession?
Mostly just thinking out loud here... not advocating one way or the other. Good topic. Good discussion. Time for steak.
A good book on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Media-Monopoly-6th-Ben-Bagdi kian/dp/0807061794/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0498667-670 0705?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178229839&sr=8-1
It is mostly about newspapers, but the idea can be easily carried out to other media.
For a long time, I wondered about their 1 to 5 scale which seemed to be a 2 to 5, but the show on the PS3 release titles would have given 0s to titles (if they had 0s). Adam Sessler absolutely slagged one of the "Gundam" titles.
This comment is not a "review" of XPlay (for better or WORSE), but when they review a game and don't like it, you'll know.
The other day the internet proved ethics were meaningless when they published HD DVD key that they had no right to publish.
Michael Dell: Hi there Colin, it's time again for me to give you your review of my new product.
Colin Crawford: Oh, Hi Mike. Let's get to it. Did you, uh, bring lube this time?
MD: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
CC: heh, heh
All together: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
MD: No. Now bend over I have more call centers to outsource.
Congratulations PC World - you are now part of the problem.
I monitored the news coming from different countries before and after the invasion of Iraq and noticed the same thing.
It was different in Britain and Canada then it was in the US. They actually questioned things and discussed both sides. It got me in the habit of reading the British press rather then US.
I'm afraid you're not the only one. Back in November I was peddling a feature piece to various publishers, and I queried Slashdot about it. An editor wrote me back quite quickly, saying that he might run the piece, although he wasn't willing to pay for it.
Well, I'm a pro writer, so I needed to try to sell it somewhere I'd get paid. That's why I declined to send the rest of it, and decided to query elsewhere.
The reason I informed him that I would never query Slashdot about an editorial again was the letter he had sent me. More specifically, it was the grammar and capitalization in the letter. The first paragraph had no capital letters at all. There were grammatical mistakes that a grade nine student wouldn't make. Speaking as somebody who edits professionally as well, the role of an editor is to make the writer's work shine - so if the editor here couldn't manage basic punctuation and capitalization, how could I ever trust him to edit something I had written?
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If you're in an office with a Microsoft sales rep and you have a magazine featuring MySQL on the cover on your desk with a few Post-It flags inserted at random pages, printed magazines can potentially save you $millions. Of course, a competitor's branded coffee cup can sometimes have the same effect.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
... this sort of thing is commonplace in business today. Look at the difference between how Rupert Murdock runs his companies (very hands-on, a master/slave relationship) and how Warren Buffett runs his companies (he buys companies that have management he believes in, and he trusts them to run their businesses).
Which one is the stand-out success, viewed as unique in business? Warren Buffett gets the nod. There are a zillion cookie-cutter versions of Rupert Murdock in business. And which one is more successful, using the metric of money? Again, Warren gets the nod.
A pity that more would-be leaders don't look to the successful leaders and try to emulate their success, but they don't.
they could reject advertising, but accept free loans/gifts of merchandise for the tests.
Behind the appearance of impropriety is the very real possibility that a manufacturer will send you a known best quality sample, while shipping crap to stores. Remember the stories about manufacturers sending overclocked cards, or other devices with custom/"beta" BIOS to product reviewers? Yeah. It happens.
CEO's of the World series of computer magazines have made the rag suck since windows 95a. The magazine PC world use to be pretty good in depth help articles and more but now they seem to be ran by the same type of people i work with. Make a buck and move along crowd.
Good luck to PC world you will need it you killed off computer shopper my magazine of choice so keep walking the road your on and sucking up to your advertisers. I'm sure your customers will tire of it like i tire of it too.
TSS
Seriously, is anyone surprised? Nearly all magazines, TV networks and big websites work like this. Even a lot medium-sized ones do it, because they rely on freebies from the manufacturers. You post something bad about the latest Intel CPU, and you can forget about getting free chips when the next generation comes. Write anything bad about an EA game and EA won't let you see the demo of the "Next Big Thing", which means your site gets less hits than the "cooperative" competition, which means your advertisers pull out. When was the last time you saw a game from a major publisher get less than "75%" at any "professional" (meaning ad-funded and with access to early previews) review site?
This is, unfortunately, one of the effects of everything becoming "free". If a site or magazine can't depend on what the readers pay, they have to get money from somewhere else to stay in business. And since IT magazines are mostly read by people interested in IT, those are the advertisers they get.
If you trust any free website that advertises the same type of products it reviews, or any site that relies on free samples from the manufacturers, you're very naïf.
Smaller "amateur" hardware sites, sometimes affiliated with a particular retailer, are far more reliable (not necessarily competent, but at least not as biased). First, because they don't need to please the people paying them. And second because the products they get for review are just like the ones everyone else can get, not a hand-picked "perfect" one sent by the manufacturer.
I'll take The Inquirer, Dan's Data and Old Man Murray over DailyTech, Tom's Hardware and Gamespot any day. If I just want to read press releases I can go straight to the manufacturers' sites.
I'm the former music editor at the Dallas Observer, an "alt-weekly" newspaper whose ad dollars have declined radically in the past two years. My job, as I saw it, was to serve as a critical voice about Dallas' independent music scene, but when I decided to aim my critical sights at concert venues that advertised in the paper, I suddenly heard a lot of noise and hubbub about how my work had become "too critical and reported."
The Dallas Observer is part of the Village Voice Media chain of papers, and one of the men responsible for overseeing all 17 music sections in the nation, John Lomax, happened to be very good friends with the Dallas publisher (essentially, the city's chief of financial decisions), as they worked together at the VVM's Houston paper for years. Once I wrote about advertisers, my relationship with the publisher vanished, and criticisms from Lomax--which had previously been all but non-existent--jumped tremendously (though he chose to issue his decrees through my Dallas boss rather than send me a single request himself). A month later, the syndicate had a "clean sweep," firing arts and music staff members at a number of papers--particularly the Village Voice's Robert Christgau--in a two-week span. I was fired very abruptly--never EVER given a "do this or else" warning, because as I'd said, Lomax was too gutless to ever issue a directive, nor was I ever given a yearly review. The reason given was "performance issues addressed on a repeated basis," which, as I've redundantly stated, wasn't even true. The replacement editor has followed the "no criticism" rules steadfastly ever since her September 2006 hiring.
The print advertising world is staffed with people who are expected to deliver results on a quarterly basis. The notion of cycles doesn't exist for people who get fired if they have a down MONTH, let alone a down quarter--and the past few years' panic over circulation scandals hasn't helped sanity on that side of any newspaper or magazine's staff. Sadly, that sense of panic has won over most publications' responsibility to deliver trusted content, but any publication that loses its dignity and respect for readers will ultimately be seen for what it is by the target audience.
Or, better put, PC World will get theirs.
The publication is founded on informing the reader about certain types of products, thus any advertising space which is accorded to any of the product manufacturers that this publication is branded to review should be treated as a priviledge for the manufacturer and thus should they be reminded of it when necessary.
Otherwise try to find another advertising space client or as a last resort recover costs in the cover price. These CEOs and you idoltrous trend whores need to get out of your daily interwound orgies and back to ubiquitous values.
Genesis 3:24
Exodus 20
Luke 10:30
John 14:28
This is guesswork, so tell me if I'm off base, but I suspect there are differences between the gun and games markets that make the former more suited to a magazine such as you describe.
First, the gun market isn't so mad about novelty. A magazine could wait until a gun is on the shelves before reviewing it and the review would still be interesting to readers. Games magazines have to get the games early, so they're already getting too close to their subjects.
Second, you can do a really thorough test of a gun in an afternoon. An afternoon playing a game won't tell you much about it.
Third, gun buyers are generally richer than games buyers. Taken together with point two, this means that a gun review magazine could raise the money needed to do the tests entirely from the cover price, while that would be hard for a games mag.
These probably aren't the only differences, but suffice to say that I'm not surprised that there are better reviews out there for guns than for games.
Xenu loves you!
I feel pretty much the same way - I used to learn tons from Macworld, and now it's all just old news and extremely basic tips that I already know. It's rare that I find anything worth reading, although I occasionally discover some piece of software that I didn't know about.
More importantly: have you replaced Macworld with anything? Is there any Mac-specific magazine out there that's worth spending the money on? If anybody has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them, because I have no idea as to what might be a single-source replacement. (Comments on multiple-source replacements are welcome, too.)
So John Dvorak is the computer worlds answer to comic writer Chris Claremont?
Not just PC World or Mac World, but the phenomena had wrecked a cable channel even earlier.
Anyone remember when there used to nifty channel known as TechTV?
Same type of B.S. killed it too. And yet all the dumbed downed stuff targeted to asshats is its successor. Meh...
You know, none of us have read McCracken's article.
Is it possible *at all* that the article wasn't in fact any good? And that McCracken's editor was doing the job he's paid to do? And that McCracken left out of pique, or because he'd been looking for an excuse to leave anyway?
Everyone's assuming that something called "Ten Things I Hate About Apple" must have been journalistic gold. Sounds like the same old junk from here.
As I like to say, "I'm old enough to remember when PC Magazine said Quattro Pro was spreadsheet of the year and WordPerfect was word processing program of the year." You _really_ think it's been Microsoft's excellence this last decade and a half?
Seriously dude - the man might come and get you if you don't!
The absolute worst I have seen are car magazines. They make a Yugo look like a Porsche..
I canceled my sub when they stated they would not run an article about refilling ink jet cartridges.
While I applaud the editor for sticking to his values, the reality is that this is how the "consumer magazine" industry works.
I am editor of a mid-size regional magazine. For many years, I fought the advertising department over gratuitous "editorial blow-jobs" for advertisers. Once I realized it was an un-winnable battle, I adopted the strategy of coming up with creative ways to address advertisers-in-content and still provide interesting and valuable information to the readers.
I also adopted a policy of simply not reviewing shoddy products in our gear test report rather than publish negative reviews. While the perception "I've never seen a negative product review in your magazine" is accurate, at least you do not read positive reviews of crappy products.
Magazines, TV programs, and even newspapers that do not "play nice" with advertisers simply do not survive. Although individual reporters and some editors might hold the utopian (and naive) notion that they are journalistically "pure," the reality is that publishers are the CEOs of their publications, and as such are more concerned with the bottom line than with "journalistic integrity." Publication and broadcasting are, after all, for-profit businesses, so profit trumps ideals every time.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
did anyone else giggle at his name? be honest.
*sigh* - and there was I thinking that mods would get the fact that using the word "gay" in that context would be seen as a clever joke. I knew I should have gone for something less subtle...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Nobody "ditched" his post. It was born that way.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.