Consumer Reports May Start To Fire Staff
Consumer Reports, the non-profit advocacy magazine owned by the Consumers Union, may fire 21 editors and product reviewers if its writer’s union does not agree to sacrifice raises. According to the New York Post, other employees have already agreed to…
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The magazine does not take advertising because it wants to appear independent when it reviews products and services. It is time for the magazine to reverse that policy, if it wants to continue to provide full services to its readers. Taking advertising does not mean catering to advertisers.
A subscription to Consumer Reports cost $26 a year. Subscribers can read reviews in which the magazine’s editors trash Starbucks (SBUX) coffee and criticize Ford (F) cars and trucks for that modest annual fee. A cut in the editorial staff at Consumer Reports would certainly hurt the quality of the testing by the Consumers Union research staff and as a result the quality of the magazine will suffer. The reader’s $26 will be going for a degraded product.
Consumer Reports won’t be Consumer Reports any more unless it comes up with new ways to bring in revenue.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
