Gizmodo
In an interesting reversal, departed PC World Editor Harry McCracken has returned to the magazine as "vice-president, editor in chief" as of this morning. What's even more surprising is that CEO Colin Crawford has been dropped from the CEO position and is taking up the executive vice president, online position. He's even given the editorial staff an apology for killing the story. His blog has removed the post about the EIC changes at PC World. The situation sounds sour for him, but I doubt Harry would have returned to work with Crawford after such a public disagreement.
But really, PC World had no choice. After 16 years of service to IDG, and the this current episode highlighting his integrity, the magazine couldn't really move forward without looking like editorial corruption was in place. Unless Harry came back.
His conditions? That "editors were allowed to be editors." He made no comment about whether or not Colin's reshuffled position were the terms of his return.
IDG is going start a search for a CEO for both PC World and Macworld, two magazines that Colin Crawford used to be the CEO of. Our thoughts? All the reader outrage online after the story first broke is what caused the sudden 180. Or, we suppose it's probably more of a 540 since PCWorld actually went ahead and published a tame 10 Things We Hate About Apple anyway.
As an aside, I think it could have been better to have PC World write the "Apple Love" piece, and Macworld write the "Apple Hate" piece. Nothing better than to provide surprising thoughts to your already hypnotized user base.
Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World [PCWorld]
Comments
Haha, that was fast, good to see PCWorld re-gaining their valuable members...still the article "Ten Things We Hate About Apple" seem toned down a bit.
Integrity and honesty, that's all it counts.
much ado about nothing
somebody needs to mention to these dinosaurs that no one pays much attention to magazines these days.
What with the InterWebs and everything!
Why wait months to see someone else discuss something for you, when you can go online and have an interactive argument about how you hate Jobs and love what Bill's done with his sweaters...
Or what ever.
Kind of ironic, don't you think - writing a magazine about the technology that's killing you off.....
lol @ photoman ... you do realize that there's this site pcworld.com on the "interwebs" that you can go to.
"Why wait months to see someone else discuss something for you, when you can go online and have an interactive argument about how you hate Jobs and love what Bill's done with his sweaters..."
I wouldn't swear to it (Al Gore hasn't said anything about it yet), but I think that's what pcworld.com is all about, you know...blogs, forums and all that kind of stuff that goes through the Intertubes where people can swear at each other and generally be asses someplace other than the real world.
You can even give Harry McCracken a piece of your mind there, if you've a mind, too!
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/?tk=nl_dnxblg
NO! Really?
Point still stands - all this storm in a tea cup was based around the editorial content, or lack of it, in the magazine.
You know - the actual physical paper thing you use to swot flies with in cubicle three at potty break.
The fact that they then used those very InterWebs of which you speak to publish the story anyway... Ahh those rebels!!
PC magazines have grown into much more than just articles about how to hack C+ on an old XT Clone or even comparisons to see if that Northgate computer could ever come close to the speed of a dell or the coolness of a Gateway 2000.
Now they cover cell phones, MP3 players, and HD televisions. The world of the PC as a geek machine is just as dead as slick paper publications.
And Harry! Way to Go! Keep up the good work sticking it to the man for all of us that have been stuck by the man.
Yeah!
"Point still stands..."
No, it doesn't.
The article in question (or any article from PC World) is available in print and online.
If your "point" were able to stand, then there's no purpose in your being here on Giz since all they do is reprint information from other sources and stick stuff down their pants.
The difference between "editorial content" and "editorial integrity" are concepts a world apart in this instance.
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