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I have been following an interesting saga taking place over at PC World magazine. Last week, Wired reported that “Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly because the company’s new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.”
According to reports, PC World was writing a column that was going to only appear on their web site and not the magazine titled, “Ten Things We Hate About Apple”. It was meant as a light hearted commentary and as discussed in follow up articles was pretty much just Digg link bait because top 10 lists lists tend to drive a lot of traffic.
As it has been reported, the new CEO Colin Crawford killed the story and instructed McCracken to be be nicer to PC World’s advertisers. After the CEO was not willing to budge on this issue, McCracken immediately resigned his position with the company that he has been with for 16 years. Crawford the CEO had just taken over the CEO position less than a month ago.
Well in a surprise move, IDG, owners of PC World, have reinstated Harry McCracken as Editor-in-Chief AND removed Colin Crawford as PC World’s CEO. WOW!! I was very surprised at this move and have to take my hat off to the leaders at IDG. There is someone there that realizes that once you start editing your “unbiased” content based on who are your advertisers, you will end up losing your company’s integrity and the confidence of your readers. And once you lose your readers confidence, it is a very long and hard road back.
This is one of the few examples I know of where the creative or editorial folks won over the business people. All businesses must be focused on the bottom line, but business folks tend to look very short term and will cut their nose off just to spite their face while the creative people understand what must be done to develop long term success.
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Technorati Tags: PC World, Wired, Harry McCracken, Colin Crawford, Apple, Steve Jobs, Digg, link bait, IDG
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This story is near and dear to my heart as my company is in discussions to do business with this online mag. I am certain this will play a role in who we deal with now and in the future. Kuddos to IDG and more so to Harry for the morals he has. Let’s hope this story circulates throughout the online and print mediums.