Mary Jo Foley on the defensive from her WWDC article

Recently, I posted an article that basically pointed out that online journalist Mary Jo Foley had posted an article that was really a bunch of sensationalist clickbaiting, claiming that Leopard was ripping off Vista. Anybody that uses "Cupertino, Start your Photocopies" and "Leopard looks like Vista" in their blog post is not making an attempt at decent objective journalism. If you posted that stuff in a forum, you'd be labelled a troll.

So today I noticed that Mary Jo Foley has posted another article (I won't link to it because I think she and her company get paid simply for referred clicks...if you want the link I'm sure you can find it). Here are some juicy bits from her second article:

"Admittedly, my headline choice (“Leopard looks like … Vista”) for my original blog posting was poor."  - Actually, the headline choice was deliberate clickbaiting and sensationalism. Perhaps "Leopard vs. Vista - an objective comparison" would have been a better choice, had she actually been doing an objective comparison.

"Instead, what I was attempting to ask was whether users out there, especially those who’ve had a chance to play with the closed Leopard betas, believe there are features and functionality in Leopard that will leapfrog what’s available in Vista." - This is nonsense. If this statement in article 2 is true, then she is admitting that she lacks the written communication skills necessary to make a concise point - in short, she is either an ineffective journalist as indicated in article 2, or she sensationalized, clickbaited, and spindoctored in article 1. Regardless of which article contains the truth, I'm not impressed either way.

Here is her final attempt at covering her butt from the previous article by making her biased arguments from the previous post seem like a "please enlighten me" attempt:

"What features coming in Leopard do you think will leapfrog Vista?" - She is clickbaiting...again. She knows full well that all of the Mac users that she pissed off with the original article will flock to the comments section and their own blogs and begin rattling off the list of all the features of Leopard that will be better than Vista... and she will draw objective analysis and she will draw more one-sided sensationalism from either side of the camp. She may not be objective, but she knows damn well what she's doing. Bottom line - she is increasing the page view count for her articles, increasing her own value and putting money in the pockets of the host web site.

I'm not going to contribute to the spiral of bashing that is sure to come out of these articles. Instead, what I'd like to point out is that she knows that in the end - everyone wins. The zealots from both camps will rise to the defensive of their favored OS, driving more and more clicks to the article(s) that fueled the war. The neutral (or at least outwardly objective) people will champion the cause of neutrality...which will probably send more traffic to the articles that caused the desire for neutrality.

Hopefully the point I have made is clear: it doesn't matter if Mary Jo is doing a good job. It doesn't matter if her original article was a question and not clickbait. It doesn't make any difference if she's being objective. The bottom line is that these two articles got exactly what she and ZDnet want: clicks. That's the bottom line. All of us who are responding to her article (whether positively or not) are doing exactly what she wanted. In the entertainment industry, they always say that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I tend to think the same of online journalism - nobody cares WHY you went and clicked on an article... only that you clicked on it.

tags: stevejobs  keynote  leopard  vista  wwdc  

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