Well, the publisher of PC World, Colin Crawford, has finally commented officially on l’Affaire McCracken:

Some of the public reports have suggested that the credibility of PC World editorial is in question and that directions were issued to give favorable coverage to advertisers or to present information in a way that favored specific advertisers.

The reports are not accurate. IDG and I hold editorial integrity in the highest regard. PC World, has not been nor will it be influenced by advisers’ pressure. Independent and trusted editorial is at the heart of everything we do. Serving our readership with fair and unbiased content comes first.

We have and will continue to run editorial and content that both praises and criticizes as appropriate without regard to the vendor relationship.

There is no shift in editorial policy at PC World, editorial integrity remains a core value and this will not change.

The news reports are from multiple sources and appear credible. To simply deny them with a handful of platitudes and not provide a response that contains substance is an insult to your readership.

Apparently, it’s also untrue. Read this update from Kim Zetter at Wired News, which pretty much confirms that the magazine is completely out of control:

After I posted this update I got wind that CEO Colin Crawford was in the midst of a staff meeting that he convened to address the controversy over McCracken’s sudden exit. …

“What it really comes down to,” the source added, “is that Harry wanted autonomy over the editorial content, and Colin is usurping that. Harry always served as a buffer between the business side and the rest of the editors and that’s gone now.”

With regard to whether or not Crawford addressed the issue of asking editors to tone down their negative reviews of vendors, the source said, “He denided that he would ever ask editors to tone down the coverage, but at the same time he said he wants the marketing people to have input on our processes.”

The meeting, which lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes, was ultimately cut short as staff members continued to pepper Crawford with questions. The last question a staff member asked was, will this happen again? Will the next editor-in-chief have last-call on what goes in the magazine or will Crawford, essentially, always be asserting his rank over editors?

“And the answer was no, I’m going to have last call,” the source said Crawford told them. “The response, essentially, was that the same damn thing would happen again (if someone clashed with him).”

I hate stories based on input from a single anonymous source, but in this case the reporting aligns with the facts, which is that a guy who has been editor-in-chief for 13 years resigns with no notice. That’s not the way you settle a disagreement over long-term direction, that’s a hostile takeover. I feel sorry for whoever steps into this job. I’ve worked for guys like this before. It never ends well.

Following up on this morning’s story about PC World editor Harry McCracken resigning over “disagreements with management”… I found this on Colin Crawford’s blog, posted less than a month ago (Crawford is the management with whom Harry had the disagreement):

Having just taken over PC World and Macworld, I know we still have a lot to do in this regard. The attitude, (despite obvious indications to the contrary that the audience needs to be front and center) is still one of pushing out content rather than pulling it in. This approach is a by-product of our print legacy and it’s out of date.

I intend to work hard to change this approach at IDG and particularly at PC World and Macworld. In one memorable interaction with Steve Jobs he very calmly told me that is was not I was wrong, it was just that I needed an “attitude adjustment”.

What is remarkably absent from that blog posting is the part where Crawford actually responds to what appears to be pressure, if not an outright insult, from Steve Jobs, a major advertiser. That’s especially noteworthy in light of this quote from the original story by former PC World employee Kim Zetter at Wired News:

Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.

“Everybody is so proud of Harry but we’re devastated that he’s gone,” said the source. “This is no way to run a magazine. But unfortunately, this looks like an indication of what we’ve got in store (from the new boss).”

I will be eagerly awaiting a statement from Crawford or from IDG that explains their side of the story. But let me say here what I said in the comments of the earlier post:

When a very well respected editor resigns with no notice after more than 13 years on the job and cites “disagreements with management” as the cause, I think anyone is justified in drawing negative inferences. So I repeat: IDG has some explaining to do.

PS: Harry’s bio notes that he “was recognized with the 2004 American Business Media’s Western Award for Editorial Courage and Integrity.”

For people who aren’t in the publishing trade, it’s easy to build elaborate conspiracy theories about the role of advertisers in editorial decisions. I’ve seen enough letters and online comments to know that some readers believe that reviews and news articles in technical publications are influenced by how many ads the subject of the story agrees to buy.

That’s why, for a professional journalist, this is one of the ugliest stories imaginable:

PC World editor resigns over apparent ad pressure

Award-winning Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken of PC World resigned Tuesday over disagreements with the magazine’s publisher regarding stories critical of advertisers, according to sources.

McCracken, reached Wednesday evening, confirmed that he resigned after 12 years at the magazine and 16 years at publisher International Data Group, over disagreements with management. He declined to comment on the nature of those disagreements.

But three sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CNET News.com that McCracken informed staffers in an afternoon meeting Wednesday that he decided to resign because Colin Crawford, senior vice president, online, at IDG Communications, was pressuring him to avoid stories that were critical of major advertisers.

Wired News reported Wednesday evening that McCracken quit after Crawford killed a draft story titled “Ten Things We Hate About Apple.”

I’ve exchanged e-mail with Harry in the past and we’ve met briefly a couple times at trade shows, most recently at CES this year. He’s a smart guy with excellent editorial instincts. I know a lot of people, directly or indirectly, who worked for Harry, and every one, without exception, speaks highly of him as a person and a professional journalist.

Thankfully, the wall between the advertising side of the house and the publishing side has been solid at every publishing house I ever worked for. My professional credits include 25 years as a magazine editor, including a stint in the late 1980s as managing editor of PC World (before Harry’s tenure) and a decade at PC Computing from 1991 to 2001, including two years as editor. I worked for more than a dozen publishers, none of whom were shy and all of whom cared about the bottom line. Never was I pressured to write a story, change a story, or spike a story for any reason except those directly related to the story itself and whether it was right for readers. I never had a single word in a story changed because someone thought it would offend an advertiser. Not once.

Oh, I had to make plenty of visits to advertisers after writing stories that were critical of the companies or their products. My role in those meetings was to listen to feedback (translation: get yelled at) and provide additional context (translation: try not to yell back). Often, those meetings started out tense but turned into valuable discussions where both sides learned something. Smart publishers know that readers love independent editors. Advertisers know that an honest review is worth many times more than one that’s bought and paid for. And readers know the difference.

Ten years ago this sort of story would have appeared in a trade magazine for publishers and editors, and most readers would never have heard about it. In the online era, the story is out in a matter of hours, and it doesn’t make IDG look good. Of course, the spiked story is even more valuable now. Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes before a copy of the story that PC World’s new CEO was trying to suppress, “Ten Things We Hate About Apple,” makes its way onto someone’s blog? I’m betting it’s less than a week.

Harry McCracken can hold his head up high today. IDG, on the other hand, needs to explain why anyone should take any of their publications seriously from now on. Something tells me a lot of editors and writers for PC World and its sister IDG publications are going to be complaining, loudly, about this. They’ve already been through an unspeakable tragedy this year with the murder of Senior Technical Editor Rex Farrance, and this incident adds professional insult to that horrifying injury.

Ironically, Harry’s apparently final blog entry at PC World says, “PC World magazine isn’t going anywhere.” He meant that it wasn’t about to cease its print version, like sister publication InfoWorld recently did. But those words have a different meaning today.

More reactions from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block of Engadget, and from Kim Zetter at the Wired Blog Network.

More reactions: Jack Schofield at the Guardian says the trail leads to Steve Jobs. And Angela Gunn at USA Today speaks for most journalists I know when she says: “Anyone who’s ever even suggested I be ‘nice’ to a vendor has gotten laughed at and ignored, but after this I’m thinking of upgrading to spitting.”