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.
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.
MacWorld is an awful magazine and has been for years.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
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.
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.
It's odd that places that do bad reviews tend to stop getting review hardware. If I see a product for the company, and a review site I trust has a review of their older product and says it sucks, I'll take this as an indication of their future products. If I see other reviews elsewhere that say both are goo, I will trust neither. If I see a review for the old one saying that it's rubbish, and a review for the new one saying that it's good, then I will trust that one a lot more, because I know that they are not afraid to say bad things when they are justified. It's odd that manufacturers can't figure that out.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"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 remember when John Dvorak got fired from InfoWorld for criticizing the Trash-80 when Radio Shack was one of InfoWorld's biggest advertisers"
You sure that was the reason?
Maybe he got fired because he was just talking out of his ass and people couldn't stand him..... same as now.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
(1) Point taken, but that's different. Intel may be an advertiser here, but there's no evidence that there's any soft-sell payola here. (Are Intel products ever reviewed here, even, besides by voluntary member posts, i.e. is this even a potential conflict of interest?) (2) The tagline aside, Slashdot is not a news site: Its stories are not reported as (even ostensibly objective) news -- they're reported more like opinionated analysis (which includes both thought-provoking and shameless flamebait). From recent (posted) summaries: "Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness." "Google's motto is 'Don't Be Evil' -- but they sure have an evil non-disclosure agreement!... Luckily, someone has posted excerpts from the NDA before he signed it and had to say silent forever." "I wonder if this time it will be more obvious to the courts that Verizon's patents aren't so original?" "How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" Also, cf. most stories about China, Diebold, Microsoft, the Microsoft topic icon, etc. These opinions may be variously well-supported by data, but they're opinions nonetheless, and are often (and unfortunately) disguised as news. How about "Analysis for Nerds, (Mostly) Stuff That Matters?"
...for not deifying Jobs these days.
Same here. I was going to let it expire in october, but now I'm going to cancel outright. PC World has gotten too low-tech, and to supportive of MS and Vista. I really don't need a monthly dose of tips on how to make Windows less broken.
Also, I would really like to see what they were going to print about Apple. It sounds like it might have been worth a good laugh or two, even if it was all old hat.
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
I don't see how this could possibly hurt him in the long run. Sure, it means he will be coasting on his savings and freelance work for a while, but he just earned back a lot of respect he had lost by being editor of such a lame magazine.
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
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.
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.
And that's too bad, because they used to be a GOOD magazine. These are some things that sent MacWorld down the tubes, and they are responsible for most of them.
So after being a Macworld purchaser and later subscriber for over 10 years, I let my sub end in May 2006.
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.