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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,
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.