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Publisher's Note: The following article first appeared the BAS Speaker; and addresses an issue we thought worthwhile. The Speaker is published by the Boston Audio Society, Box 7, Boston, MA 02215. We welcome comment on this article by manufacturers, other reviewers, and (of course) readers.
by E. Brad Meyer
I'd like to step outside the field of audio hardware for once and talk about journal istic ethics. A semi-major flurry on the subject burst forth in the computer press last summer when Byte magazine accused itself and other publications of being less than thorough in distinguishing editorial mate rial from advertising. The resulting arguments are relevant to the more general field of technical writing for consumers.
The computer magazine business is, of course, vastly different from its audio counterpart, in which three national monthlies provide an unchanging back drop for a bunch of smaller rags beloved by one or another group of fanatics. The computer press has in the past two years covered America's newsstands like kudzu. This impenetrable growth is starting to thin al ready, but half a hundred magazines still boast national distribution, and an appalling number run to more than 500 pages a month.
The editors of these heavies are in a truly terrible position. As Don Lancaster says in his delightful book, The Incredible Secret Money Machine, "Most editors are desperate for anything of value to print. Each and every issue, forever and ever, they have this gaping maw to shovel articles into." An editor must come up with enough articles to fill a number of pages that is determined by a combination of the size of the "book" and the set proportion of advertising to editorial material. In the past year computer magazines were deluged with ads, and as the page count went up, so did the number of editorial pages to fill. When a monthly magazine starts to resemble the medium-sized city's phone book, a phrase like "gaping maw" pales in comparison to reality.
Inevitably, standards slipped. Computer related companies realized what was going on, and hired writers to turn promotional product descriptions into what sounded like feature articles. These landed on the desks of harried editors who, seeing that the material was (1) about computers, (2) professionally typed, and (3) reasonably literate, put it in the magazine without looking too closely at the business associations of the authors.
It may seem obvious that any text writ ten to promote a product should be labeled as advertising; the dividing line is clear. Or is it? If I, as a freelance writer, am enthusiastic about a product, I'm free to say so in an independent review-but what does "independent" mean? The review is definitely not independent if I have accepted payment from the manufacturer to sing the praises of the product sight unseen, as happened in a few of the above-mentioned computer articles. The objectivity of my opinions is also suspect if I have accepted payment from the product's maker for the time spent testing it and writing the review.
But what if the payment comes not in cash but in kind? In other words, what if the manufacturer gives me the product for nothing? Here the waters start to get murky.
No deal has been made, no contract signed. But one of the two important elements in a contract-the consideration-is there, creating the possibility of compensation for services rendered. Who is to say whether I will feel gratitude, or how it will be expressed? Consider the matter of free equipment, from both points of view. The manufacturer wants to call attention to the product.
Some items, like cartridges, can't be resold and are always given away. For a small receiver that will be stamped out by the thousands, the possible benefit so over whelms the cost of shipping a few out to reviewers that the company doesn't need the assurance of a good review; any will serve. (After Stereo Review published Alan Lofft's article holding high-end audio up to mild ridicule, several of the manufacturers whose names appeared in the piece called the magazine to thank them for the publicity and the resulting spurt in sales.) Expensive items that a reviewer might want to keep and use, like a pair of electrostatic headphones or a digital processor, are offered for purchase at an "industry accommodation price" of a few per cent above wholesale; even though the equipment has been bought, there is a built-in cash benefit.
A reviewer must have samples of new equipment to do his job. If he's freelancing, he can't afford to buy the stuff on the open market like Consumer's Union. Even the in dependent testing labs hired by the big monthlies don't have anything like the resources to do that; compared to the number of people who buy refrigerators, TV sets, and bicycles, the audio market is tiny. Anyway, Hirsch, Feldman, and Foster have to fight to hold down the influx of stuff to manageable levels.
So the situation is complicated. One can argue that it isn't in Julian Hirsch's enlightened self-interest to compromise his credibility by false praise. Julian impresses me as one of the most fundamentally honest people I've met, but those inclined not to trust him will never change their minds because to them his position in the industry com promises his opinions. (I am often annoyed by the unwillingness of such people to distinguish Hirsch's instinctive forthrightness from the hide-the flaws approach of Len Feldman's reviews.) Let me be specific about the way the system works. While hardly a major equipment reviewer, as an occasional writer of feature articles for the big monthlies I'm on the list of those entitled to certain perquisites. I bought my Sony PCM- F1, an American 110-volt model with full warranty, in July 1982 from Sony in New Jersey for a price slightly higher than you could get them by mail order from Japan at the time. I could have turned it over right away and made at least $300 on the deal. I have since written many words of praise about the FI, without the slightest worry about my own honesty and sincerity; it is an exceptionally well-designed and useful pro duct, one of the few classic pieces of audio hardware, and I am being totally true to my experiences when I say so. But if I were running for elective office I'd be up in front of a bunch of TV cameras trying to explain the "coincidence." I have also written commissioned articles for publications in technical magazines; for example, one about the AR Adaptive Digital Signal Processor for Design News. For that piece I was paid jointly by the magazine and by AR, because the magazine by itself couldn't or wouldn't pay me enough for the amount of work involved. Now, it doesn't say in the byline that I was working partly for AR. What's more, I borrowed in several places from a description of the product written by Bob Berkovitz, AR's director of research, without giving him credit. Was the article deceptive? There is no final answer to that question.
But I don't think that what I did was wrong, mostly because of the context. Design News is not published for, nor is it read by, consumers; the subtitle on the cover is "News for Design Engineers." Its readers expect hard information, and they get it, whether in articles, in advertisements, or in the "new-product" announcements that are (like the ones in the hi-fi monthlies) not much more than lightly-edited press releases.
Most of the feature articles in DN are written by the magazine's staff from a combination of materials supplied by individual companies and their own experience in industrial design; they called me at AR's suggestion because they don't know audio. My article is simply the most lucid explanation I could summon forth of the basic problems of loudspeakers in small rooms, and of how AR's new device attempts to solve them. It was honestly written, and I felt no qualms about publishing a slightly-edited version in The Speaker (Volume 9, Nos. 9-10), where you can read it and decide for yourself.
One more example before I open the floor for discussion. Last March (1984) I, Peter Mitchell, and several other BAS members who happen to work for monthly audio magazines in the U.S. and Canada accepted a very valuable favor from Technics corporation: a trip to Japan, with virtually all expenses paid, including air fare, meals, bus rides within and between the cities of Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and several different kinds of strange and amusing evening entertainment. We sat through three solid days of technical presentations, plant tours, and product demonstrations, then spent three more days touring and recreating. We were showered with small gifts of all kinds, and after our return I received a parcel containing a beautifully packaged 9 1/2-lb moving coil step-up transformer and an equally beautiful low-mass MC cartridge with a tapered-boron-pipe cantilever. A while later they sent me a pair of their flat-panel coaxial speakers to evaluate at home.
On the plane over I asked a fellow member, who had been on one of these junkets before, why Technics would spend the
$100,000 or so it must have cost to play host for the group. (They do this regularly, as do other Japanese companies, two weeks after our expedition Sony brought another bunch of journalists over.) "I think they basically want three things," he began.
"First, they want us to be aware of what they're doing, because they are genuinely proud of their work and their facilities. Second, they consider us to be experts on the American market, so they want to pick our brains about products and ideas. And finally, they want us to get a kind of warm glow every time we hear the name 'Technics'." Well, I am grateful for the trip, and for the little gifts, and for the audio equipment too.
I plan to write reviews of the cartridge, transformer, and speakers for these pages, suitably annotated with the warning, "sup plied by the manufacturer," though that seems a bit of an understatement in this case. Having sufficient hubris about my reputation to have told the truth to our hosts in Japan about what I heard while I was there, I'm not worried that t will be tempted to lie to you. But you have a right to know the circumstances under which a writer is working when his or her opinions are part of the deal.
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[based on a March 1986, Stereophile review article]
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