“The piece, a whimsical article titled ‘Ten Things We Hate About Apple,’ was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers,” Zetter writes.
Zetter writes, “Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.”
“The source didn’t know the specifics of what was in the story Crawford wanted to kill but said it was nothing new. ‘It was supposed to be light fare, just really innocuous stuff. The same kinds of things people have said about Apple before — things that teased Steve Jobs,’ he said,” Zetter writes.
“I reached McCracken on his cell who, from the sound of the background noise, seemed to be leaving the MacWorld party as we talked,” Zetter writes.
Zetter writes, “He didn’t want to discuss the details of why he resigned but said he quit ‘because of some fundamental disagreements with Colin.’ He emphasized that he wasn’t fired or forced out and holds no ill feelings toward the company… He said he actually resigned yesterday, but workers found out only about an hour ago. When asked what he’ll do now he said, ‘I’m going to blog and freelance at least for a while. I’ll probably write for PC World by the way. I want to make clear that I’m a huge admirer of what PC World does and I’m not leaving hoping that PC World will collapse with out me. I’m sure it won’t collapse without me.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Twilightmoon” for the heads up.]
As Zetter writes, a “Ten Things We Hate About Apple” article certainly would be “nothing new.” Sheer boredom. Which is hopefully why Crawford killed the article. (For the record, we’d say the same if it was supposed to be “Ten Things We Love About Apple” — how many of these lame love/hate list articles do we need?) The rest of this blog report contains some stuff that may or may not be related to McCraken’s resignation from an anonymous source that may or may not have an ulterior motive to paint Crawford in a bad light. We also have McCracken’s take on the whole thing, which sounds a lot less conspiratorial than Zetter’s unnamed PC World source.
So, good luck in the future to whomever deserves it.
And, yes, we do still wish that Harry’s name was “Phil” instead.