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.

Re:Good character

[TheSpoom]

To be fair, I'm sure they used to have an AMD one as well. In fact... [slashdot.org]

British Mags

[Jerrry]

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.

Re:Good character

[TheRaven64]

More interesting is http://vendors.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. 100% AMD until the end of last year, then 100% Intel. It's a shame, because with more than a single advertiser it could be quite interesting. I mainly come to Slashdot for the discussion, and quite often a press release is as worthy of discussion as actual news (or, what passes for news around here).

Re:Good character

[boarder8925]

To be fair, I'm sure they used to have an AMD one as well. In fact... [slashdot.org]

Hasn't been updated since December, and it's not linked to on the Vendors [slashdot.org] page either--just Intel.

And for the record, I think the Opinion Center's a pile of sh*t.

...and that's different than SlashDot how?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

PC World reviews should be thought of as no more than press releases

...and that's different than the source of 95% of SlashDot "articles" how?

(Also, I can't believe someone here has a PAID subscription to PCWorld; what a mark!)

Re:British Mags

[thetable123]

It's not just the computer rags from over there. They will bash anything if it is garbage regardless of who advertises or sponsors. Check out Car magazine where you can see them bash a manufacturer right next to said manufacturers ad. I would mention Top Gear too, but as it isn't advertiser supported...

Re:Who reads computer magazines anyway?

[crush]

Well, sometimes a magazine is lighter and easier to carry around and higher resolution than a laptop. You can get a nice DVD of the latest Fedora/Debian/whatever plus some articles to read for about $10 (e.g. Linux Format), you can help pay for the journalism that goes into something like Linux Journal (which is excellent).

There's a place for dead tree still.

Dunno.

[eddy]

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 [gdmag.com] 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.

Re:Who reads computer magazines anyway?

[owlstead]

"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."

Uh, I travel by train, and I love to read the C'T magazine while traveling. It's available in Dutch and German only, unfortunately (for you). It's pretty geeky and pretty good, and has very interesting articles. I used to buy Dr Dobbs as well, but now I only buy the Java specific ones (too many articles that are not in my field). I used to buy the Byte as well, if only for the well written (but very common) articles by Jerry Pournelle. Alas, that time has gone.

It's definately still possible for a magazine to be better written, better informed than most grub on the internet. Of course, 50-70% of the magazines aren't worth a dime, and I won't buy them. I think most computer magazines from the UK are *horrible*, but that might be because we only get the really popular ones. I like the linux magazines very much as well, but they are too expensive over here.

Re:Consumers are responsible too

[PCM2]

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.

Unfortunately, no. The money is not coming from the consumer. PC World is going to price its magazine at a rate that will help to subsidize the cost of putting it on the newsstands (which, if you understand how that business works, is extremely wasteful) while not alienating readers. The real money then comes from advertising.

Because magazines have these two revenue sources, the formulae used to come up with cover prices and ad rates can be fairly complicated. Ads are typically sold based on the number of readers the ad will reach and the value of the reader to the advertiser. So if you raise the cover price by $2, that might decrease the effective circulation, which will end up lowering the ad rate. It's not an easy business to survive in, to be sure.

Reminds me a bit of FOX news and Monsanto

[brit74]

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 [youtube.com]

It wasn't the advertisers

[PCM2]

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.

Of course they do

[EmbeddedJanitor]

And that extends to the way the press report about government issues.

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.

Re:Who reads computer magazines anyway?

[dabraun]

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.

Not trying to insunuate that you're a n00b or anything, but back before the internet computer mags were a valuable source of information. Computer Shopper (which used to be several times larger than it is now) was often the best way to find good prices on hardware. Earlier than that I remember eyeing the various clones in the XT/AT era advertized in paper mags. Now that's all pointless, there is nothing in the world of PCs that I'm going to find in a magazine that I can't find several times faster on the 'net and with more options to compare between.

The same holds true for many, but not all, non-computer topics these days.

Re:Good character

[bynary]

You could check for or write a GreaseMonkey [mozilla.org] script for Firefox. You do use Firefox [getfirefox.com], right?

That's not the only reason

[artifex2004]

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.

Re:I can't believe CmdrTaco ...

[javaxjb]

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.