There’s a bizarre article in the NYTimes today, about the appointment of two editors at Consumer Reports and the mag’s upcoming redesign. It begins:
As it struggles to recover from a recent flawed article about children’s car seats, Consumer Reports has named two new editors and announced a redesign.
Hmm. Sounds almost like the flawed article has led to the appointments and the redesign. We learn that Kim Kleman has been named editor-in-chief, while retaining her position at the mag’s parent company. Greg Daugherty will cover editorial personnel.
From there, we’re told that the incorrect article about child safety seat tests has damaged the Consumer Reports brand:
In a “Safety Alert” article in its February issue, Consumer Reports said that 10 infant car seats failed its safety test and called for one seat to be recalled.
In an editorial in that issue, the magazine’s president, James Guest, wrote that the images he saw of the tests “filled me with dread: Dummies tumbled like Raggedy Anns, seats flew across the lab, plastic bases cracked.”
Within weeks, the magazine’s executives retracted the article and apologized, saying the tests, which the magazine said were conducted by an outside company, had been botched. The May issue contains an explanation of the mistake.
“When Consumer Reports has to come out and apologize in public and in print, that’s big for a magazine that has been trusted for years,” Mr. Husni said. “This is going to require a big forgiveness.”
Wow! This is terrible! No wonder the magazine has appointed two new positions and undergone a redesign! It must be on the verge of collapse! Wait. . . what’s the very next paragraph say?
Circulation did not drop at Consumer Reports, nor has its subscription growth slowed since it retracted the car seat article, said Ken Weine, a company spokesman.
Newsstand sales have reached 160,000 each month this year, twice those three years ago. The magazine, which does not accept advertising, has 4.3 million print readers, and 2.8 million who pay to read its online version, Mr. Weine said.
The redesign will provide more information about the magazine’s product-testing methods, but Ms. Kleman said that the change was not in response to the car seat episode. Instead, the additional testing information will be provided as a way for the magazine to set itself apart from other sources of product information like consumer review sites, she said.
Oh. So, the magazine’s actually doing fine? The safety seat alert and retraction didn’t cause mass cancellations, and newsstand sales have doubled from 3 years ago? The redesign isn’t in response to the alert? (I’ve worked in magazines for more than 10 years; a redesign isn’t something you frivolously roll out.)
All of which is to say, this article is bullshit.
The writer (or her editor) is trying to shoehorn the child seat controversy into an article about pretty standard day-to-day operations at a magazine. Neither appointment appears to have anything to do with that story (that editor-in-chief slot has been vacant since October), the magazine’s credibility is unaffected (except in the eyes of the chairman of the journalism dept. at U of Mississippi), and the redesign is an attempt to create more brand awareness for CR (to help it stand out from online review-sites).
When you get down to it, I bet its retraction of that child seat article was a lot more comprehensive than the corrections that the Times is in the habit of running. Of course, Consumer Reports depends on the trust and goodwill of its readers, since it doesn’t accept advertising.
