When I met Shirley Williams

I’ve mentioned before on this blog that it was through dabbling in the student media while studying at Imperial College that I ended up as a journalist; the opportunities to learn about such things helped me decide that it was that – rather than writing computer software – that I wanted to do for a living.

While tidying up recently, my mother came across a photocopy of an old issue of Felix, the student newspaper at Imperial, which is probably one of the first pieces I had published. It’s dated Friday October 31^st 1986, which puts it at the end of my second month there (I learnt how to work the typesetter in my first week!).

It’s a report of a talk to the Women In Science and Technology group that was given by Shirley Williams, which I covered for the newspaper; at the time, only 17% of the students at Imperial were women.

So, although it’s another off-topic post, I thought I’d share it with people here. The scanned text is below the image. It’s interesting to see that some of the same concerns expressed back in 1986 are just as relevant today.

The article as it appeared in Felix, on October 31st 1986

Williams and WIST

Mrs Shirley Williams, the President of the SDP, addressed a meeting of Women in Science and Technology (WIST) on Tuesday. The main theme of her talk was the changing role of women in society, and in particular the role that she saw for women in scientific subjects, Mrs Williams felt that it was up to women to raise questions about the impact of science upon society. She cited examples of ‘prestige‘ projects, in Third World countries where, for example, huge hydro-electric schemes are created, with a consequent loss and erosion of land needed to produce food, and warned that “We cannot afford scientifically illiterate students of humanities and humanistically illiterate students of science”.

On the subject of women as leaders, Mrs Williams noted that successful women leaders have had many of the same qualities as men in the same positions-toughness, ruthlessness, logic and aggression-and proclaimed that “women can be just as good as men are.” Although she admitted that women in power often had masculine qualities, Mrs Williams suggested that a gentler, feminine approach to problems would produce better results in the long term and gave as an example the manner in which Germany was treated after the Second World War, contrasting it, with the treatment after the First, and the subsequent rise of Hitler. Still on the subject of women in positions of power, Mrs Williams did not feel that segregation, for example by the creation of a Women’s Minister, would help. Rather, this would lead to patronisation and help to keep women out of key positions. It would, she suggested, be far better to enforce equality by a system of monitoring to ensure fair practice, or the imposition of Contract Compliance, whereby a company cannot win a contract unless it proves that it treats everyone equally.

Asked by FELIX if she thought that the lack of women in science and technology was due to the standard of teaching and the shortage of science teachers, she replied that teachers were ludicrously badly paid, and that a 10% pay increase in real terms, together with conversion courses, was needed to attract people back in to teaching. Though she felt that co-education was in principle a good thing, Mrs Williams expressed the view that it also reduced the number of women taking science subjects, as they were encouraged towards the more ‘traditional‘ areas. She also felt that the creation of the new Technical Colleges would empty the schools of scientists and make the problem worse.

FELIX asked Mrs Williams for her opinion of the new Unemployment Benefit questionnaire, which may disqualify those, such as students, who are unable to travel to find work. She asserted that this was “An attempt to reduce the number of unemployed before the next election” and said that the SDP would provide a ‘basic benefit’ for students studying after the age of l6, with removal of fees for part time students.

Questioned about the possibility of student loans, Mrs Williams stated that the SDP believed them to be necessary only in the case where the parental contribution is not made, and that they would have to be provided at low interest rates. The SDP has, she said, no plans to replace grants by loans, and would like to remove the need for a parental contribution, though she admitted that this could not be done very quickly. The first priority of Mrs Williams’ party is to increase all higher education by 50%, giving equal emphasis to both humanities and science, rather than boosting science at the expense of humanities.

Nigel Whitfield

Can you trust reviews?

This is the last part of a four part posting, beginning with Everbody knows how reviews work

Part 3 – Selection bias

The question at the end is “Can you trust reviews.” I’d say yes you can – but of course you’ll be expecting me to say that.

I do hope, though, that I’ve given some fairly good reasons why the influence of advertisers is nowhere near as big as many people imagine it to be. The real issue is money – the simple need to actually make a living and pay for the roof over your head.

For a full time freelance, doing product reviews can be a pretty thankless task; as I mentioned, writing features can be a better way to make a living. I do a mix of the two – simple gadget reviews, plus features on specific areas about which I’ve decided to learn a lot of background (like digital TV), and related reviews.

Will an unpaid reviewer, or someone who’s not doing this to make a living do a better review? That really depends. If you’re doing it for love, and you have unlimited time to write 3000 words on a digital TV recorder, then good for you, and good for your readers. But I would dispute the assertion that an unpaid blogger must necessarily be more accurate and better informed than a professional writer.

A look around various blogs will find some that are, undoubtedly, excellent, written by people who are well informed, and spend time crafting detailed reviews. It will also find some that are shockingly partisan, and others that are barely literate.

On the whole, by virtue of employing editors and sub-editors, professionally written reviews will tend to read better; I don’t think that’s too contentious a point. Will they be more accurate? I’d say that they can be – where an editor commissions someone to write, because they have broad experience over many years, in a particular area, for example.

Are we all – both bloggers and professional writers – in thrall to PRs who let us keep shiny lovely gadgets? I don’t think so. Companies are far less generous than they used to be – and even in the past, most review kit that was particularly covetable was reclaimed, sooner or later.

Sure, I have cupboards with gadgets that time forgot – and that’s tended to be nothing to do with the review I wrote, but simply the march of progress. If a PR company wants back the broadband router than can’t even do ADSL2, they’re welcome – I need the space. It’s certainly not going to influence what I write about their next one.

If you think my living room is full of the latest AV gear, and fancy gadgets, it’s not. While many of us might take advantage of a press discount (though these days, you can often buy cheaper at places like Richer Sounds) if we’ve liked something, keeping a neat gadget just doesn’t tend to happen. Why would you write a good review of an indifferent product, just because you wanted to keep it?

Yes, we get to play with the latest fancy gadgets. No, on the whole, we don’t get to keep them. Sometimes, professional writers get to go on fancy trips – I went with Panasonic to their Convention in Munich earlier this year. I saw lots of new products, had a fun evening in a beer hall, and flirted with a cute PR guy.

Has it made me write better things about Panasonic products? Well, their TV came joint third in a roundup I wrote for Register Hardware, and I’ve been critical of other products they make, so if that was their plan, it doesn’t seem to have worked. Nor does that sort of thing, in my view, influence other writers I know.

I hope, at the end of this – admittedly rather long – piece, you’ll at least understand a bit more about how reviews work in the tech press, for the UK at any rate.

Of course advertisers have a role, but as I’ve explained, it’s a far, far smaller one than most people imagine.

Selection bias

Part 2 – The problems with reviews

You might – and I hope you will – accept by now that the finances are one of the main reasons for some reviews not being as good as you might like them to be. But still, there are questions about those pesky advertisers. Do they get more reviews than people who don’t, or better ones?

In the case of freelance reviews, the freelance simply won’t have a clue whether or not a company is advertising in a magazine, so it’s hard to see how that can affect their conclusions – and I don’t recall meeting enough freelances claiming “X changed my review and gave the product a higher rating” to make me think that happens systematically. Yes, a rating might occasionally be tweaked by an editor, but that’s often because the editor’s got knowledge of other comparable products, or feels the text doesn’t match up with the rating given.

No one has ever, in all my years, called up and said “Can you review this, and go easy on them,” let alone suggesting it’s because they’re an advertiser.

Even with in-house reviews, it doesn’t really happen. There’s not as much contact between advertising and editorial staff as some people imagine there to be, and a staff writer who’s told by the reviews editor “350 words on this, by Monday please” really isn’t likely to have a clue whether or not the product is from a potential advertiser or not. And again, in my experience, the commissioning editor doesn’t give the writer a line on what they want the review to come out like. I have been asked precisely once in almost 20 years to alter the tone of a piece – and that was to make a vox-pop piece more critical of a company, not less, by selecting different quotes.

Hang on, someone at the back is doubtless shouting, but don’t people who advertise win more awards? Impossible to say, with any certainty, and you run into a case of “post hoc ergo propter hoc,” which is to say that you can’t necessarily prove a causal link.

If a company advertises, and wins awards from a magazine, which came first? Do they advertise more in a magazine because they have an “Editor’s choice” logo that looks like an endorsement? Perhaps. Did they get that because they advertise? Most unlikely, in my experience, that there was a causal link.

However, I do accept that there is what could be called a ‘selection bias’ at times. That is that when someone on the ad sales team is speaking with a client, who mentions they have a new product, they’ll pass on the name of whoever commissions reviews. And, sometimes, when the reviews editor is hoping to get a product in from a company that they’ve not written about before, they might ask the advertising team if they have a contact name.

But does that ever extend to the ads team saying “can you do a good review of this? It’ll help us sell some pages” Again, in my experience the answer is no. There is a ‘selection bias’ in that contact with the ads department might make it more likely that the reviews editor knows of a product or company, and makes it stand out a little more from the mass of press releases vying for their attention.

Even then, that’s a long way from garnering a good review, just because someone advertises. As I mentioned before, in my experience, publishers will back an editor who upsets an advertiser.

Selection bias isn’t ideal – but it’s probably unavoidable, and of course it takes other forms too. As a reviews editor, you’ll get to know the various PR people, and you’ll get on better with some than with others. You’ll learn which ones can reliably get you a product first, or at short notice. And when someone else lets you down, you know that if you call up a particular company, they’ll be able to send you their latest PC or gadget, so that you can fill the half page gap that’s been left by someone else’s product being stranded in a volcanic ash cloud.

Part 4 – Can you trust reviews?

The problems with reviews

Part 1 – Everybody knows how reviews work

What about those bad reviews? Why didn’t the reviewer find the flaws that an experienced user would find in a few minutes?

It’s tempting for the casual observer to assume that everything wrong with product reviews must be to do with advertiser influence. But again, speaking from my own experience, that certainly isn’t the case.

However, the conditions under which reviews are written certainly does have an impact on their quality, so it’s worth looking at them.

Print media is having a bit of a bad time right now, to put it mildly, but aside from a few very well funded magazines, the IT press has never exactly been massively overstaffed. When I worked on Computer Buyer, the editorial team (that’s not counting the guys who do art, or the production desk) was me, a deputy editor, technical and features editors, and an editorial assistant – five people, including the assistant. Most work was done by freelances.

Around the same time, over at Personal Computer World, they had eight or nine, plus some testers in the labs; the by the time PCW was closed, the editorial office was four people, plus a labs team of one.

Meanwhile, on the freelance side of things, the rate that most magazines pay has not changed in years; I can’t remember the last time I chatted with a fellow freelance to be told that they’d had their rate increased. It’s more likely to have been the same for five years or more, and during that time, as the number of staff in magazine offices has decreased, freelances have had to take on more of the work, for the same money.

So, for example, a freelance will often be the person sourcing kit and pitching reviews to magazines. As well as writing the review, you’ll also have to sort out photography – either submitting PR shots with it, or taking your own, and seldom being paid for them. You may be expected to mark up the copy using a specific template, to save time on a smaller production desk. All these things would have been done in house in the past, by production teams and editorial assistants.

Follow the money

But surely, you cry, freelances are rewarded handsomely for their work, aren’t they? Well, not so much, actually. I won’t give exact figures, and they differ anyway from one publication to another. Typically, for a half page review in a print magazine like Personal Computer World, you’d earn less than £80. For a full page review, you might earn a little short of £200.

Sounds reasonable, on the face of it. Until you wonder “why did the reviewer miss that?” And you realise that, when you want to make a living out of this, you have to do a lot of work. For a half page review to make sense, you need to do it in a day – that’s playing with the kit, exploring its quirks, taking screenshots, and writing the copy.

If you’re reviewing something that’s problematic – perhaps there are clashes with drivers on your computer, or some weird issue you’ve discovered – what happens next? If you spend time tinkering, and calling technical support, and it runs to two days, then you’ve made £80 for sixteen hours work. That’s not even minimum wage – and that’s the biggest reason why there are errors with reviews.

You might have 350 words (or 750, for just under £200) to explain a product, to get over the idea of what it does, and why it might or might not be worth a look, and you need to get it done fairly swiftly, if you’re actually going to come out ahead, or you’d be better off flipping burgers.

There are solutions to this, of course. You’ll often see that one person has written a few reviews of a product, for different magazines or websites – it’s a good way to increase the return on the time you’ve spent testing something, and allow yourself more time. Everyone gets a better review as a result, and as a freelance you make more cash. It’s also worth mentioning here that some websites pay a flat fee for reviews that makes the amounts I’ve quoted here look extremely generous.

The other solution is to focus on specific areas, which is what I do. Find something you enjoy, you want to keep abreast of, and consider the time spent tinkering and toying time well spent, because it keeps you up to speed when you have to review a product – you know where to look for the main flaws, or quirks, or what to test for, because you’ve seen this sort of thing before. And, allied to this, write features. If you have in depth knowledge, writing features is, frankly, a better way to make a living than reviews, in my experience.

Part 3 – selection bias

Everybody knows how reviews work

As well as writing and editing stuff about gadgets, digital TV and computers, I spend a fair bit of time participating on various forums. And one of the assertions that I come up against time and time again is that “Everybody knows advertisers get good reviews.”

It’s a popular meme, oft repeated online, and sometimes with the assertion that bloggers must somehow be immune to this, compared to ‘traditional media,’ because they don’t rely on advertising. But I think that’s not necessarily the truth either.

Now, I’m not going to say that every single person out there doing product reviews is whiter than white; I don’t know them all, and I can’t vouch for them. But I can say, as someone who’s been writing for the computer press for just under 20 years, that I have never once come across a case where advertisers have influenced reviews. I’ll go a bit further than that. I have personal experience of them being rebuffed when they try to, and the way in which most reviews are commissioned today means there’s probably even less chance of it happening.

Plenty of people will doubtless say “but a review of product X didn’t mention glaring flaw Y, so it must be because they advertise.” I’m not going to excuse bad reviews, either – we all know they appear sometimes, and many of us have read a review of a product we own and thought “well, how did they miss that?” So it’s worth looking at – and the answer almost certainly isn’t that the advertisers have been leaning on someone.

It’s important to remember that I’m just talking about computer magazines here, on the whole. I started on Computer Buyer when it launched in 1991, and was editor for around 18 months before going freelance in the spring of 1995. I’ve written, at various times, for Active Home, AOL UK, Computer Active, Computer Shopper, Home Entertainment, Internet World, Mac User, PC Advisor, PC Plus, Personal Computer World, Register Hardware, T3, The Mac, The Register, VNUnet, Web User, What Mobile and What PC. I’ve done much more for some of those – like PCW – than others. But, generally, that’s a fair selection of the UK IT press.

First hand experience

Have I ever, even once, been asked to write a review that favours an advertiser, whether working as freelance or as staff? No, I have not.

Have I ever had an advertiser attempt to influence a review? One and a half times. The first was when I was Editor of Computer Buyer. As part of a group test of PCs, we included a system from a particular company, which I’ll call Brand X.

The staffer who wrote the review – for whatever reason – frankly didn’t do a good job. After it was published, we received a complaint from Brand X that there were factual errors – things like the brand of hard drive and CD drive were wrong. That was easy to verify when I took the machine apart myself (and yes, in an ideal world, you’d pay two people to do every test, and verify each other’s work. Let me know when you find a publishing company that rich, and I’ll come work for it.)

So, we accepted that there were errors, and we’d be happy to correct them. And we’d also be happy to run another review of a system from the supplier (which was nothing to do with them being an advertiser, but simply because I felt that a proper review would be better than an incorrect review, with corrections following a month or two later).

In principle, they agreed. I told them to send a PC for review, and I would send it to one of our freelance reviewers, who would know nothing of the situation, or of the conversations surrounding it, to ensure that they got a fair review. At which point, I was told “I don’t want a fair review, I want a good one.”

Naturally, I protested, and was told “Get XX (a specific person) to write a good review, or we’ll pull all our advertising.” I told them they could have a fair review, or nothing at all, and they said they’d pull their advertising. I told my publisher, who backed me up. They pulled their advertising, and then returned a few months later when they’d finished sulking.

The ‘half a time’ I mentioned? A freelance we used on a magazine I worked for did a good review of a product. The company let him keep the product afterwards, and later he pitched their next product as a review. I declined, and never commissioned him again.

So, there you have it, to set against your “everyone knows the advertisers call the shots” meme, some first hand experience, where they absolutely don’t. Is that enough to change your mind?

Part 2 – the problems with reviews