President’s Letter

Check your X-ray

by Roy Harris, National President; Senior Editor, CFO

What makes a courageous magazine editor? Today, just taking the job — with its incumbent risks, personal and professional — is often an act of bravery. The flight of advertisers from print, shrinking revenues, and migration to the digital world are enough to make the grittiest editor blanch.

But of course, persevering is only one type of courage. On a trip to the Truman Museum in Independence, Mo., years ago, I bought my editor-in-chief at CFO a replica of Give ’Em Hell Harry’s “The Buck Stops Here” sign. The gift was only partly in jest; the editor should be the one to take a stand on editorial and ethical issues. And it is the stance you take that displays your backbone.

Mirror image

You don’t need an X-ray to see the strength in Computerworld’s spine. The magazine was honored as ASBPE Magazine of the Year in both 2004 and 2006, in no small measure because of its editorial integrity. Now, American Business Media has bestowed its Timothy White Award on an editor there for the second time since 2004. This year, it is Don Tennant. ABM’s Jesse H. Neal Awards represent the publisher’s take on journalism excellence — unlike our Azbees, which offer peer recognition from editors. ABM’s White Award, though, is special. It focuses on “business journalists whose work demonstrates integrity, courage, and passion.”

Tennant displays all three qualities. In a column last July, he wrote this about a huge industry advertiser: “One of the dumbest vendor moves I’ve seen in a long time was made last week by the geniuses at Oracle. These guys thought it would be a really good idea to place a big ad in The Wall Street Journal that read simply, ‘Computer Associates (CA) runs SAP.’ At the bottom of the ad was Oracle’s logo and contact information.”

The column noted that the snide ad — an attempt to capitalize on CA’s problems by linking them to SAP — was aimed at “the one company that stands in the way of Oracle’s worldwide domination of the [enterprise-resource-planning software] market.” The attempt at guilt by association was undercut because “…guess what. CA runs Oracle, too,” Tennant noted. And his column concluded this way: “If that ad tarnished anyone’s image, it was Oracle’s.” Had Oracle thought it through, it “would have recognized that, like most finger-pointers, they were pointing in the mirror.”

Other Tennant columns, criticizing CA, Novell, and Hewlett-Packard, “ unflinchingly held IT vendors publicly accountable for their actions,” ABM noted.

Also, though, when Computerworld faced a case of plagiarism in its own pages, his public confession, in print, “responded immediately and forthrightly and resolved to set an example of openness and humility." [See here and here.]

“They’ll be back”

Tennant is characteristically humble about the Timothy White honor. Of his own philosophy at Computerworld, Tennant says, “ I’m not sure it differs at all from that of most other editors.”

But he’s clearly thoughtful about what the award means. “ Whether a company is an advertiser, major or not, has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on our editorial coverage in general or my editorializing in particular. As a company, our mission is to serve both advertisers and readers, but as an Editorial Department our mission is solely to serve the readers.”

Computerworld doesn’t have “free reign to mindlessly bash vendors the way, say, readers do when they post negative comments on our Web site,” he says. Rather, the editor must satisfy himself that his criticism “is warranted, and that making it serves a constructive purpose for the reader.”

When advertisers pull out of the magazine, Computerworld is fortunate to have “everyone at IDG” — starting with the company’s owner, Pat McGovern — support the editorial decision that caused the exodus. McGovern’s philosophy? “They’ll be back” — drawn, in fact, by the attractiveness of ad space in a publication that readers prize for truthfulness and integrity.

Congratulations to Don Tennant, and to ABM for acknowledging his special contributions. And for reminding us once again that our publications exist for the benefit of readers.

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