The cowards at the Story Board, an obscure blog for magazine-industry apologists, “opted to remove the responses to the question ‘Who was the least effective editor you worked with in 2010?’ ”
Here’s what the site originally published then unpublished. It’s one finding from a poll of freelance writers. (Emphasis added.)
Who was the least effective magazine editor you worked with in 2010?
This is a sampling of a somewhat small pool of responses. In fact, the most common answers were variations on “none” or “none so bad last year that I’d wish to condemn them.” We should also note: these answers are totally anonymous and we didn’t ask respondents to explain their reasons for these answers.
- Antonia Whyatt (Chatelaine)
- Gary Ross (Vancouver)
- Jared Bland (The Walrus)
- Matt Blackett (Spacing)
- Deb Cummings
- Cathrin Bradbury (Maclean’s)
Surely the entrenched mediocrity of Toronto, and its quisling enablers, could not possibly explain this deletion of attested facts? (They’re reporting the results of a poll, not making up tales out of whole cloth.)
I suppose the site’s refusal to own up to its own findings makes sense once you realize the Story Board is a joint venture of Derek Finkle’s agency for freelance magazine writers and the union that also represents the CBC. Telling the truth about the incompetence of Finkle’s clientele’s clientele tends to undermine one’s bargaining position, I assume.
Now, if they’d done this right, Story Board’s owners would have released the number of respondents, the number that actually answered the question, and the number of respondents per entry. But that too would have required competent reporting of attested facts. The criticism of Story Board’s reporting that sticks is its incompleteness and inaccuracy, not its capacity to embarrass Story Board’s owners or scuttle business negotiations.