Last calendar week theWall Street Journalran a storyabout James Oppenheim , technology editor forChild Magazine . Mr. Oppenheim was recently invited to a Texas TV show to speak about the late tech toys for nestling . One of the contraption he touted on the air was Kodak ’s “ My ABC ’s Picture Book . ” He also recommended gizmos from Atari , Leapfrog , Mattel , Microsoft , and RadioShack .
According to theJournal , Mr. Oppenheim and his idiot box hosts ignore to bring up one thing : Those companies had all paid him to bring up their product on the air . Mr. Oppenheim later run on NBC’sTodayshow and touted the same Kodak product ( though the troupe did not specifically ante up him for that mention . )
I ’m trusted plenty of you hear a narration like that and say , “ Well , duh . ”
It ’s a sad fact of writing about technology that some of our referee recall we ’re on the take . Or , to put it less bluntly , many of our more cynical readers think our business sake are too close interlace with those of the companies we track for us to be completely trustworthy .
Which helps excuse the chemical reaction we received to a revue in our April 2005 offspring . The product was the database app Panorama . The writer was a guy wire we ’ve worked with several times before . We ’ve been happy with his premature work , and he ’s a database developer by professing , so he seemed ideally qualified to write the followup . He did , we published the results , and the varsity letter started pouring in .
The chief complaint in many of them : That the guy we ’d rent to write the review makes his living work with FileMaker , Panorama ’s chief competitor . It ’s dead on target : Anyone google on the writer ’s name would find out that he runs a company that rise databases using FileMaker . He ’s also taught classes about the program .
Does his background disqualify him from critique a rival intersection ? We patently did n’t think so — in fact , it ’s one of the reasonswhywe hire him . We stand behind him and ( with the exception of one relatively pocket-sized factual computer error that we ’ll be correcting in a future issue ) we stand behind our review .
But , at the same sentence , I can see those reader ill . We could have been more up - front about who our reader was and where he was coming from .
Much as we might sometimes wish it , our reviews are n’t write by robots . They ’re written by human beings and inform by their authors ’ finicky experience and perspectives . Can we be completely , scientifically objective in value software system ? Of course not . But we can be asfairas humanly possible .
And we can also be more transparent . That ’s why , go in our June 2005 issue , we ’ll be providing scant biography of the authors of all our major reviews . ( We ’ve already added one to the on-line version of that Panorama followup . ) That fashion , you ’ll eff who our reviewers are and have some idea about their qualifications and perspectives . If our reviewer is a FileMaker user , so be it : That experience ( which I suspect he shares with many of his readers ) can inform his critique . But you should fuck about it up front .
I cogitate most of you are savvy enough to take that info and aline your reading accordingly . With guys like James Oppenheim running around , it ’s the least we can do .
