PC World Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken announced in a blog entry today that he will be stepping down in June to build his own tech site from scratch. McCracken gained notoriety last May, after temporarily resigning due to the publisher’s pressure to kill an anti-Apple piece. Giz wishes Harry the best of luck in the next stage of his career. [PC World]
I’m sure the editors at PC World didn’t think their declaration that the fastest Vista notebook ever was a Macbook Pro would be immortalised in a Mac vs. PC Ad. Of course, PC benchmarks go stale fast. I wonder what’s going to be announced at Macworld 08. [Apple via TUAW] More »
In an interesting reversal, departed PC World Editor Harry McCracken has returned to the magazine as “vice-president, editor in chief”. 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.
IDG is going start a search for a CEO for both PC World and Macworld, two magazines that Colin Crawford used to be CEOs 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. – Jason Chen
Editor in Chief Harry McCracken Returns to PC World [PCWorld]
Wired has an interesting follow-up piece about Harry McCracken’s resignation from PC World. Crawford’s blog says that “We have and will continue to run editorial and content that both praises and criticizes as appropriate without regard to the vendor relationship.”
But then a statement from IDG’s Howard Sholkin: “The reason is that Colin and Harry had a disagreement on one opinion piece related to Apple and they could not come to a settlement as to how the differences should be resolved so Harry felt that necessitated him resigning.” Hello IDG knuckleheads: The fact that management even has a say in editorial matters is wrong.
PC World’s US Editor in Chief, Harry McCracken, has resigned. The reason he resigned — the company’s CEO killing a story entitled “Ten Things We Hate About Apple” — shows how the magazine’s editorial is fighting hard to keep its integrity, and that McCracken’s departure shows that he’s not going to put up with this crap.
You see, CEO Crawford apparently told editors that their reviews and articles were too critical of the vendors — the same vendors who advertise in their magazine. Hence, the order came down that they “had to start being nicer to advertisers.”
