Ouch:
Barry Diller, the billionaire chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), said he regrets his decision to acquire Newsweek magazine, which he merged with the Daily Beast website in 2010.
“I wish I hadn’t bought Newsweek,” he said today in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “It was a mistake.”
Not sure why anyone would think a printed weekly magazine of news would have any commercial value today.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal wrote a head-scratching post today. “Windows 8: Not for Old-at-Heart PCs.”
Here’s how it starts:
If you’re thinking of upgrading your PC to the new Windows 8, be prepared for hassles and disappointment, especially if the computer is more than a year or two old — even if it technically meets the basic requirements to run the new version.
I know this, because I’ve spent big chunks of the past week trying to upgrade to Windows 8 two big-name, well-regarded PCs — a 2008 Lenovo laptop and a 2009 Hewlett-Packard touchscreen desktop. The process was painful, and it resulted in lost capabilities, even though both PCs ran Windows 7 quite well and met the minimum requirements for running Windows 8.
But as we journalists say, Walt buried the lede. Here’s where he should have started:
Part of this problem was my fault, I guess. If I had thought to burrow through the Lenovo or HP websites, I might have found that my models weren’t considered by their own makers to be fit for upgrading.
For instance, HP’s information page, at http://bit.ly/SdTCVp, said this about my TouchSmart, after I located and entered its obscure, official product number: “HP has not tested this PC. For this reason, HP is unable to provide upgrade instructions or Windows 8 drivers. You may lose basic functionality & stability if you try to upgrade.” Alas, I learned this only after I had upgraded.
And even though the post leads with an illustration of the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant, Walt admits he didn’t run that useful tool:
Microsoft does offer Upgrade Assistant software that might have warned me of the problems, available at http://bit.ly/SdUxFo. But the box for the Windows 8 Pro DVD I was using only suggested running this utility and checking with the manufacturer’s website, in tiny type at the bottom of its back cover.
We’ll never know if the Upgrade Assistant would have spared the hassles that Walt writes about with what seems to be almost glee. But I can tell you how to decrease the likelihood that you’ll have headaches:
And if you start to run into problems, consider it a message from the upgrade gods:
Also, I had problems with the installer itself. On the HP, it wouldn’t work with either the DVDs or a downloaded version of Windows 8. So I had to transfer the downloaded version to a 4 gigabyte USB flash drive to get it to work. (It requires at least a 3 gigabyte drive.)
Frankly, running Windows 8 on a four- or five-year-old PC seems like an exercise in problem-creating to me. The machines were originally designed for Windows Vista. Walt says both PCs were running Windows 7 quite well. So what is the point in upgrading to a new operating system designed for modern touch hardware?
Every writer and editor knows the pitfalls of complaining about typos and minor grammatical mistakes in someone else’s. Murphy’s Law of Nitpicking says when you do that, you will invariably include a typo or a factual error in your own piece.
The stakes go twice as high when you start making lofty pronouncements about journalism and ethics. Today’s object lesson is BetaNews, which ran a story by Ed Oswald headlined “Blogger Ethics Questioned Over Microsoft Ad.”
Rule #1: If you’re a blogger writing about “whether bloggers should be considered journalists,” it helps to get the journalistic fundamentals right. Like spelling the name of Federated Media founder John Battelle properly. Misspelling it once is a typo. Getting it wrong three times (Batelle, with one T) is just sloppy.
Rule #2: If you’re going to throw penalty flags over mixing ads and editorial, you really should try not to have a Microsoft pop-up ad embedded in the text of the story! Here, see for yourself.
That’s a screen shot of the BetaNews story as it looked when I read it in my browser this afternoon. That double-underline under the word Microsoft in the second graf is a link to a paid ad from Vibrant Media. Here’s a close-up look at the pop-up ad that appeared when I moved the mouse pointer over the tagged word:
You want to talk about mixing advertising with content? This, in my opinion, is much worse than anything the Federated Media gang is accused of doing. This technique literally embeds advertiser messages in the words written by the post’s author. The effect is to encourage a site owner to write more about topics that result in more expensive paid ads and higher clicks. I don’t blame Microsoft for buying these ads, but I do blame the site owners who succumb to the lure of seemingly easy money and buy into this shady concept.
I hate these Vibrant ads (and the similar product from AdBrite) with a passion. I won’t allow them on this site and I go out of my way to avoid visiting sites that use them, including BetaNews. And yes, I realize that the double underlines make them look different from standard user-created links, but never underestimate the naivete of readers. And I’m sick of seeing these stupid ads pop up as I move my mouse over the page.
Ads don’t belong in content. Period.
PS: PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken, who has recent firsthand experience with the wall between ads and editorial (thankfully, it ended well for him), says “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Exactly right.
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.”
Back in the days when I was managing editor of PC World and then editor of PC Computing, I used to literally have nightmares about this sort of thing:
Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing – everyone knows it’s important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.
Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.
On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine’s editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.
Good thing the magazine, based in San Francisco, is a monthly. “If it had happened a week later, we would have been in trouble,” said Josh Quittner, the editor.
There were hard copies of edited articles, because they had been sent out for legal review, but the art department had to rebuild every graphic element and redo every layout by hand.
How does this happen? Because everyone assumed the backup system was working and never tested its document recovery features.
There’s a lesson for you.
In our information-dense world, we don’t read, we scan. if I receive an e-mail newsletter, it might contain a dozen headlines. if the headline writer is good, I might only click on one or two of the stories to see what it’s all about. But anyone in the e-mail marketing business can tell you that most people are too busy to click through. They scan the headlines and then move on.
So what happens when one of those headlines is misleading or just plain wrong? A perfect example appeared in a ZDNet e-mail I received this morning.[*] One headline read as follows:
Why we banned Windows Vista
Clicking through to the article itself reveals a subtle difference in the headline:
Huh? Why the scare quotes around that word? Maybe because the National Institute for Standards and Technology didn’t ban anything? From the story itself (emphasis added):
Simon Szykman, chief information officer at NIST, was slightly irked by some of the media reports on his agency’s move, which painted the ban as a major slap in Microsoft’s face. In fact, Szykman said, this is business as usual. Ultimately, NIST expects many of its PCs will run Vista.
Direct quote from the interview:
Q: What is your current position on Windows Vista?
Szykman: Our policy states that we’re not allowing users to install or deploy Windows Vista for the time being. We consider this to be an interim policy to give us the time to do the adequate testing of Vista before we deploy it. We don’t expect to have any obstacles that would prevent us from eventually deploying Vista.
So what happened to the truth? Let’s review. The original story, which was widely circulated, created the impression that an influential government agency – one that publishes the National Vulnerability Database of computer security issues – had found serious flaws in Windows Vista. The reality, it turns out, is that they were doing what just about every business and government agency is doing, which is to block deployment of a new operating system until it can be fully tested.
So ZDNet’s many subscribers open their e-mail newsletter today and see a headline for a follow-up story on this issue. That headline seems to confirm that the original story was true. Those who don’t click through and read the story will never notice that the headline is factually incorrect. Instead, they’ll file away another small bit of (incorrect) data that reinforces the original (incorrect) story.
A better headline might have been:
“We didn’t ‘ban’ Vista,” NIST chief says
Meanwhile, no correction on this story.
[*] Full disclosure: I write for ZDNet, but I have no influence over its news coverage, and I certainly don’t agree with every editorial decision that appears on its pages.
Last week I noticed that the blurb along the right side of the Microsoft Monitor blog … er, research service from Jupiter Research no longer mentions Joe Wilcox, and his last post there was November 10.
Joe’s picture and by-line seem to be attached to recent posts at Microsoft Watch, which started on November 13.
Curiously, there’s no announcement at either location. When I googled used my favorite search engine to see if there’s any news, I found this post on Joe’s personal site:
My personal Weblog has been sorely neglected as of late. That’s because I’ve been wrapping up things at my current job. Tomorrow is my last day as an analyst with JupiterResearch. On Monday, I start at Ziff Davis as editor of Microsoft-Watch. I’m going back to journalism, which I increasingly missed in recent months. I clocked three-and-a-half years as an analyst. End of business tomorrow, that chapter of my work life closes.
I’m looking forward to seeing Joe take over Microsoft Watch, which has been in limbo since Mary Jo Foley left. But damn, Joe, you have got to fix the design on that personal site! That is truly painful.
Does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to create hyperlinks?
If so, please send it along to Paul Thurrott. He obviously hasn’t mastered that skill yet.
In this week’s blog post, Paul picks up a story from Neowin about the delay of SP3 but doesn’t link to the original Neowin report. (I did.) He quotes dueling statements from McAfee and Microsoft on their escalating brouhaha but doesn’t link to either one. He quotes the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog on their response to a reported bug in IE7 but doesn’t link to it. (I did.) Same with stories about Sony and HP and Apple and Google. See a pattern here? It’s like he’s saying, “Want more details? Google it, buddy! I’m too busy to make those links!”
Oh yeah, and he mentions me, too, by name. I’m really not interested in getting into a food fight with Mr. T, but this really is an important thing. Why does a responsible journalist provide links to articles he writes about? And why should that be one of the criteria you use when evaluating who you get information from? Because that’s the only way you can go check the source for yourself and learn more. (Here’s an example of why it matters.) That’s also the only way you can verify that the person writing the story is not making stuff up. But Paul doesn’t do that. And in the story where he calls me out by name, he just plain gets the facts wrong:
There was a lot of silliness online about Windows Vista licensing this past week, with one of my more vitriolic colleagues, Ed Bott, taking me to task for publishing an article that relayed Microsoft’s official position on the Vista EULA (End User License Agreement). After explaining that this was the wrong thing to do, and claiming he had all the facts, Bott then later published an email Q & A he had with Microsoft himself a few days later, because he was “still trying to understand the confusing new licensing terms.”
But, oops! No links! So Paul’s many fans will just have to shake their heads and tsk-tsk about this Bott guy without ever reading what I wrote. Ironically, in the article that sent Paul around the bend, I wrote:
I’ve dug deeply into this issue and I’m convinced that he’s being spun by his sources at Microsoft. Unlike Paul, I’ll give you links to all the facts, so you can read the supporting documents and decide for yourself.
Go ahead, follow the links to Paul’s post and mine and see for yourself if you can find the part where I claimed to have all the facts. I did have about a dozen more facts than Paul, all of which contradicted his sloppy research, which consisted of phoning a Microsoft product manager and printing a quote. That’s not journalism, that’s stenography.
I don’t bother subscribing to Paul’s 436 weekly articles (I may have missed a few – the man is definitely a faster typist than me) precisely because he often gets stuff wrong and he never cites his sources. So even if I find something interesting, Paul’s articles don’t do anything to help me learn more about it. But his name pops up in Technorati and he gets linked to by other people occasionally, so I see stuff like this.
It’s a great way to run your own personal echo chamber, I suppose, but it’s not journalism. And Paul? You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t use a single expletive.
Over to you, Paul. And I’ll get you that tutorial on hyperlinking as soon as I can dig it up.
Ed Bott 