Silicon Valley Watcher: Harry McCracken
01:46 | 
Harry McCracken is the editor-in-chief of PC World. He recently resigned when his publisher asked him not to publish an article critical of Apple, fearing Steve Jobs’ reputation for holding long grudges and not wanting to risk the loss of Apple’s advertising dollars. Things are tough in the publishing industry, but that doesn’t mean journalistic ethics and best practices will be abandoned.
The dispute soon blew over and he was persuaded to stay on at IDG’s PC World while his publisher was reassigned to another position. The incident shed light on the importance of professional journalism and showed the independence of editorial teams. I interviewed Mr. McCracken at Stanford University.
Tags: Harry McCracken, PC World, Apple, Steve Jobs
2 Responses to “Silicon Valley Watcher: Harry McCracken”
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Copyright ©2008 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Modified: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:07:21 -0700
June 15th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
I’m glad to see IDG still respects its editors and reporters. A few years ago, as a senior reporter for Computerworld Magazine, IDG’s flagship, I wrote a series of hard-hitting articles on Oracle price gauging. It resulted in Oracle pulling all of its ads from every IDG magazine it advertised in (IDG publishes 300 magazines in 85 countries).
It was the most stress I’ve ever experienced as a journalist. But IDG did not back down (although there were a lot of calls for my head - and fortunately my reporting was dead on correct).
My hat’s off to Harry and to IDG, especially since I left my last gig as editor of a homeland defense publication due to the same issue. That magazine still sells its editorial pages and still makes sure its big advertisers are never challenged in its pages.
June 18th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Thanks for your comment Dan. This kind of thing does go on, mostly in smaller publications.
A related tactic comes from large companies that will refuse access to their top executives as a retaliation against unfavorable articles. This is used against some quite large publications. IBM once did this to Businesweek, and HP has done it against CBS Marketwatch in the past…