__/ [ BearItAll ] on Friday 04 May 2007 11:34 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> PC World Editor Resigns When Ordered Not to Criticize Advertisers
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Apparently he also told the staff that product reviews had to be
>> | nicer to vendors who advertise in the magazine. The sad thing is
>> | that given the economics of publishing in this day and age, I
>> | doubt anything even comes of this even tho it essentially
>> | confirms that PC World reviews should be thought of as no
>> | more than press releases. I know that's how I will consider
>> | links from them in the future. But congratulations to anyone
>> | willing to stick to their guns on such matters.
>> `----
>>
>> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/03/1810239&from=rss
>>
>
> Didn't we always know that?
>
> Lets get this out, I'm sure this will shock some, probably will shock the
> same sort of people who get shocked when they see a crease on their pillow
> case is not quite straight.
>
> Jernos work in this way. They come out of UNI with a degree in English and
> some amusing pictures of themselves in the UNI bar. Then go looking for a
> job writing for a mag or a news paper. One of them gets a job writing for a
> Computer mag. He doesn't know anything about them but it's ok, it is easy
> to get round that little short coming. His editor tells him they want a
> tutorial on how to get NFS working for this months mag.
>
> He looks online gathering vital information, the NFS Howto. Then he copies
> and pastes it into his text editor, putting bits of his own text in between
> various points to make it look like he wrote it himself, he even changes
> the order of some of the steps just so no one twiggs that he cheated. He
> will write it in a way that assumes every step in the Howto will work
> exactly as it is written, no side steps, he can't because he hasn't
> actually worked out what NFS is yet. Then he presses publish and his first
> day is finished by lunch time so off he goes to the gym, for a nail
> manicure and a facial (what the hell is a facial anyway? Do they cut off
> the raggy bits or something, gads I'd have no face left if they did that to
> me).
>
> I wish the world wasn't like that, but it is. The only mag that I would put
> on the shelf of 'Real Work' rather than the shelf of 'Bullshit and Cribbed
> by mindless Dolts' is Program Now. Because it was writen by techies for
> techies. I wish I could also say New Scientist, but that has lots of jernos
> too now. But don't go thinking that I am only supporting Program Now
> because I was in it once. It was only about 20 lines of asm code and a
> maths formulae that I had worked out all on my own, it's true!!, you ask
> the physisist I was working with at the time, he checked it for me before I
> sent it in and corrected a dozen or so mistakes. In fact I still have that
> somewhere I'll see if I can find it over the weekend and republish it.
It's very telling when the author just quotes the expert endlessly and then
explains in simple terms what that means. It's a case of playing safe, but
rarely is there balance. Then there might be some analysis, but it's usually
quite shallow. That's why I prefer reading analysis from technical bloggers.
They are in it for the work, not for the writing. It means there's more
substance, but maybe it's harder to read. It's a tradeoff. At least you know
that there's no advertiser paying for their post (or ripping it apart).
--
~~ Best regards
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Spam enchanted evening..."
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
1:00pm up 5 days 21:15, 4 users, load average: 1.53, 1.02, 1.06
http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
|
|
