It's just not Joe Wilcox's week. On Thursday, I beat him down for extremely faulty logic regarding his post on the Windows Vista Family Discount. The this morning, Ed Bott calls him out for not fact-checking his post about IE7 woes. If the comments on the stories on Microsoft Watch are any indication, the natives are not happy with the direction the site has taken. It always seemed like Joe was blatantly anti-Microsoft over at Jupiter, and IMO, not much has changed since he moved from "analyst" to "reporter". Neither one apparently requires facts.
As if that wasn't enough. (Edit: This next part has nothing to do with Joe, it's his employer that I have a problem with here.) So on Wednesday, I was doing some research for my "Longhorn Reset" post, and I was searching the net for posts about Windows "Fiji". I came across this post from Brandon LeBlanc, who links to a post from Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft Watch about the subject. To my shock, her name had been removed from the post. Don't believe me? Well, look at the article as it was published on April 13, 2006, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. After completing a search, I found that several other MJ posts we had linked to in the past had also purged her byline. In fact, I'm pretty sure they removed her name from her entire body of work.
I was completely stunned. I cannot BELIEVE that a journalistic organization would attempt to remove any trace of a writer's work just because they don't work there anymore. That's total bullsh!t. I asked MJ about the circumstances around her departure from MicrosoftWatch, and she said there wasn't any bad blood when she left... so why was that necessary?
That's the last straw. I'm done with Ziff Davis, which means I'm not just deleting my RSS feed subscription for Microsoft-Watch (which I did after MJ left, only to try re-subscribing after Wilcox showed up)... I'm canceling my subscriptions to eWeek and, unfortunately, PC Magazine. It makes me kinda sad, since PCMag has been really good to the site in the past. It has become quite clear that the organization is no longer interested in presenting reality to its readers, and is completely devoid of journalistic integrity. Which means that I have no use for them anymore. And the only way to do that is to stop sending them my traffic and my money.
And as a side note to any Ziff Staff Writer: I'd make backup copies of all your articles, because Ziff will probably screw you someday when you leave. Thank God for the Wayback Machine.
UPDATE: This is not a dig on Joe, but I don't buy the "brand confusion" argument that was used against both Joe and MJ. A person's work is a person's work, it doesn't matter who someone currently works for. It wouldn't be any more acceptable for NBC to go back through the archives and edit out Katie Couric from any NBC broadcast because she works for CBS now... how is this any different? If editors don't think that we're smart enough to figure out which site is which and who is writing for whom, then they are dumber than they think we are. All the more reason why I don't trust Ziff Davis or JupiterResearch anymore.
And to clarify, Joe's not the reason I'm canceling my subscriptions, the byline crap is. But I put MW in there because I gave it another chance after they brought Joe in, and it hasn't got any better IMO.
UPDATE2: They resolved this situation. I blogged about it here.