I wonder if all the media outlets and "tech" websites who gushed over it will have anything to say? Hopefuly your mate at the SMH will do a little follow-up at least...
Yep.
We need to start bothering people like the CNet editors who gave this a "Product of the Year" award before it was even available.
As an ex-journo I find this interesting and/or disturbing.
Let me set the scene. I used to work on the, arguably better end, of news-stand computer magazines in the UK and we used to take great pains to try and get things right. I've often heard it opined by members of the public that advertising has an effect on editorial content but I can tell you that hard battles were fought with anyone (advertising, publishers, manufacturers who provided review equipment) to stop this happening and I can't think of a single instance where editorial didn't win the day. Note that I can only speak for the UK magazines that I worked on as staff (PC Magazine, pub. Ziff-Davis, PC Pro, pub. Dennis) and sister journals from the same publishers (which in the case of Ziff-Davis includes Ziff-Davis USA which had a very strong, almost religious, culture of editorial independence). That is, I'm saying I can only strictly speak for the places where I've actually witnessed the battles first hand but I have no doubt that much the same happened at most similar publishers.
We used to take awards very seriously, and all - right down to the 'best in test' in each and every issue - had strict rules around them. We took them seriously because readers genuinely relied on them and took notice of them
1. The least of these rules was that a product, as awarded, had to be shipping and had to continue being shipped in the reviewed configuration for a certain minimum period. At PC Pro, we named and shamed anyone who broke the rules under the sobriquet 'sharks' - yes, we got quite a lot of letters from lawyers, they didn't change things.
Now I'm very grateful for the online 'press' such as we might call them. Increasingly I find that I'm getting a much broader, much more detailed and much more accurate version of 'The News' from online sources than I do from the so called main stream media (MSM). Often important stories are missing from the MSM that do show up from online sources.
The question for me is, evidenced by the type of actions such as CNet's described above, where are the journalistic ethics that I have seen played out in the past and what can be done to restore them? We had our ethics because we felt it was our job to serve the readers and they were largely self-policed as part of our own journo culture and ethos. Thus they were largely invisible to outsiders except in the quality of the work we produced. The quality of the work produced by CNet and others who have uncritically endorsed Batteroo, Triton et al indicates that there is a fundamental problem with the ethics and ethos of, at least some, online tech news outlets.
1 There are a number of reasons I know readers took these awards seriously. One is that a little known UK PC manufacturer called Panrix just about tripled their turnover after getting awarded one of the best in test categories in the first ever issue of PC Pro. And this before we'd had a chance to build a reputation with our readers - to be fair we probably carried some readers over as we 'incorporated' a title that was killed the same month as we launched.
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