Readers,
Everyone makes mistakes and the best that can come out of one is a sinvecere apology and a determination to learn a lesson and improve for the future.
In last week's Ruby Weekly, we mistakenly included some material that unkindly referenced Reddit's ex-CEO Ellen Pao (it rhetorically asked if your app deployments were as 'horrible'). Pao has suffered a lot of negative press and abuse online recently and this reference was irrelevant, unnecessary and in poor taste. Contributing to a negative bandwagon does not fit with what readers expect of our newsletter.
I personally apologize to our readers and Ellen Pao for not meeting our usual standards. I also want to thank the readers who reached out to me about this matter for keeping us in check.
While the material was sponsor supplied and not written by us, we are responsible to our readers for their experience. Nonetheless, the advertiser has made their own statement here. I lacked the full context for the reference in this situation and made a poor, and wrong, off-the-cuff decision to not reject the material due to its topical nature.
We're enacting these immediate policies to prevent future reoccurances:
-
TWO REVIEW POLICY. Every issue we send now will be reviewed by two people, so there can be no simple excuses of tiredness, "missing" something, or similar, if inappropriate material is about to be sent. Someone in-house has been promoted to take on this role but we are also considering external backup.
-
MATERIAL TIMING POLICY. Our technology is agile enough to accept advertiser material up until the minute of publication, but the chance of inappropriate material slipping through goes up if it is supplied so close to publication. As such, we will extend our policy to being that material supplied less than 24 hours prior to publication has no guarantee of being included verbatim and may be edited by us.
-
NO (UNDUE) NEGATIVITY POLICY. Our new editorial policy will include disallowing negative advertising or linking to material that makes undue negative assertions or comparisons of people, natural or corporate, other than where there is a clear public interest and relevance from a journalistic point of view.
Now that Cooper Press is growing and has multiple permanent staff, our standards in terms of checking for error, taste, sponsor material, etc, must improve accordingly. I hope that by implementing and standing behind the policies above, this incident will only be a teething problem leading to a better reader experience all round.
While this statement is signed by me personally, all of Cooper Press' staff stand behind it and promise to implement and assist with these new policies forthwith.
Peter Cooper
Publisher-in-chief
Cooper Press
Overall, this is good stuff. Thank you. I think the no-negativity policy might get some refinement: negative critiques of the actions that a person/company/institution takes seems like it would be fair (assuming it's not just name-calling), which is I think what you're aiming for when you say it "might be fair game" to speak negatively about a prominent open source leader mismanaging a project. It's still not ok to just call that person "horrible," but it would be potentially ok to refer to "horrible mismanagement" of a project.
I really appreciate how you've taken responsibility and also taken action to improve for the future. Thank you.