PC World Editor Resigns When Ordered Not to Criticize Advertisers 327
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.
Wait a... (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this mean the Slashvertisements will stop and you will actually start checking submissions? Never mind PC World, hooray for Slashdot!!
Hey, it happens (Score:5, Interesting)
Same for most major news outlets? (Score:1, Interesting)
YES! (Score:2, Interesting)
This has been going on for 15 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics of Publishing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Consumers are responsible too (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue then becomes the content in the magazine isn't good enough to warrant the price an advertising-free magazine would cost.
So one editor has morals? Too bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [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.
The Economics Of Journalism (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Way of the world. (Score:5, Interesting)
He sounds like a stand up guy. He certainly did the right thing...If your publication descends into newsvertisements there's really no way to get your credibility back. Look at PC Magazine...They gave Norton Antivirus a 4.5 out of 5 one year in a review, and the average customer response was a 1.5, where 1 was the lowest possible score. What a crock of crap.
People don't read things for the advertisements, hard as it may be for ad people to accept that, and if your content becomes one with your advertising, then you start hemorrhaging readers, and your days are numbered.
This is really common (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:This has been going on for 15 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Well shortly after that a rep from IBM showed up at the shop I worked at and was wondering what it would take for us to push OS/2. I told him "It won't happen. Our customers would bring all of their systems back to us". Well he took exception to this and wanted to schedule an appointment to come back to the shop and install it on one of our rigs to demo how great it was.
So he came a couple of days later and I wiped one of our midrange system for him and let him have at it. I had other duties so I couldn't hover over his shoulder the whole time, but judging from how long it took there looked to be some problems. Anyway he finally got it installed and started demoing the multithreading aspect to me, which I already knew but didn't care about because my beef was with compatibility.
Anyway, the guy ran off after demoing all the "gee, that's cool but it doesn't do ME any good" features because he had another appointment. You'd think if he wanted a convert he'd have spent more time with me, but that's IBM marketing for you. After he left I started wondering "Hey, where's the sound?". So I looked in back of the computer and saw the speakers were unplugged. I thought that was kind of weird, so I plugged them back in and was greeted by the OS/2 startup sound looping rapidly over and over again. Yep, he couldn't get the sound drivers working so he solved the problem by unplugging the speakers. Too bad he had taken off before I discovered that. The thing was a standard Sound Blaster card, too.
A weird analogy - Gun Tests and other examples (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:This has been going on for 15 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Brett
Kilobaud and Dr. Dobbs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good character (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Free" Press (Score:5, Interesting)
What does happen then? Why do magazines end up publishing good reviews of fairly crappy titles? Because a lot of the time what they are reviewing isn't a finished game, for one thing. It is a 90% done beta because, remember, magazines have to hit the shelves on time, so they have to review what they can get, and they give the publisher the bennie of the doubt. Then there are the trips and tchokies. Want to go to Candlestick Park and take batting practice from Vita Blue? I got that junket for Electronic Games Magazine once. Want a $250 leather jacket for free? Well, you should see the ones we got for the last of the Harpoon series, they kicked ass. And so on. I had closets full of this stuff... Finally, there is simply workload. If you are working in the industry, you never finish a game. You never come close. When I was at the height of my work in that field, I was burning through 200 games or so a year to keep up. How many of them do you think I really *played*? The four or so a year I wrote strategy guides on got completely played, the others got a day, if that.
I really doubt much has changed in the last five years. The industry is very good at influencing the game mags and the game mags and everyone makes money off the gamer. It is a symbotic relationship, but not one where anyone ever actually threatens to "pull" review copies or anything so crass. Again, it might happen to the small fry websites, but not to any of the players.
Re:"Free" Press (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a french website (www.factornews.com) with editors that have pretty high standards and are known to often criticize games publishers and developers alike quite harshly (and god help you should you release hastily photoshopped preview screenshots). They not even doing this as a full-time job, they rely on advertisements from publishers to pay for their bandwidth, and they're not quite the biggest french video game review website.
Yet they receive free copies of games from publishers all the time, because they have become a respected site that is known for their independance. There are even quite a few professional french game developers commenting the news and posting on their forums regularly.
A friend of mine who write there even received a n-gage 2 from nokia ouf of the blue even though he blasted the first one on the website.
Re:Good character (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a VERY similar experience, but was fired: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:A weird analogy - Gun Tests and other examples (Score:3, Interesting)