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.
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.
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
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!
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.
Harry McCracken has been an editor at several publications for quite some time. I was a freelance writer in the mid-80s to early 90s and was regularly took assignments from him. I was once assigned to review a new software package that was in late beta and was concerned that the review would turn out negative, but I was still dealing with a beta version. I wanted to hold until the release version, but deadlines and schedules being what they are in the publishing business that wasn't an option. Harry said maintaining integrity was important, that I should point out the problems and we would note that it was still in beta (I actually liked the design, but the bugs made it too unreliable for serious work). While things can change in nearly two decades, this fits the character of Harry McCracken as I knew him.
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear