Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post.
The great thing about journalism is that I get to tell the truth. I regularly tell people who don’t believe me about instances when editors backed me up, even if it meant upsetting a source or advertiser. I haven’t had a single story spiked due to advertising pressures in all my years as a reporter.
I like to think that this is because I’ve worked for some pretty good publications.
One example is this week’s brou-ha-ha at PCWorld, another IDG pub. The editor in chief wanted to run a column unflattering to an advertiser (Apple). The CEO of the company didn’t. When push came to shove, the editor stood his ground, and the CEO got the boot.
Disclaimer: I worked at IDG’s Computerworld for a year at the turn of the century, and have done some occasional writing for several IDG publications since then (and still do).
Here’s a nice overview from CNET.
Here’s the online discussion board at PC World, where readers wrote in horrified about the firing.
Here is PCWorld’s own story, and here’s the story that caused the flap to begin with: 10 Things We Hate About Apple.
It’s things like this that make me very, very happy to be a journalist.
Signing off in Shanghai,
Maria
