Volunteer and semi-pro hardware review sites are how most of us get the lowdown on the latest PC upgrades. An ongoing spat between Hexus.net and gaming PC makers Alienware gives a brief insight into how dire the situation can become.
The short of it is that Hexus, angered by Alienware's apparent refusal to send them more hardware following a poor review, has elected to reveal publicly their email correspondence with Alienware's PR.
The initial response might be to tut-tut at Alienware's craven attitude toward marketing, but looking at it more closely, Hexus.net's apalling behavior in response makes it easy to see things a different way.
"One of the things that honest reviewers hate the most," Hexus.net's editorial on the matter begins, "is the email - or phone call - that thanks them for a "great" review. An assessment that a review is fair or accurate makes no one squirm. But calling it "great" makes us worry that we missed some fundamental flaw the manufacturer expected us to spot. Either that or they think we went easy on them - nudge, nudge - because they advertise with us."
In truth, the honest reviewer could not care less what phone calls they get from advertisers. The honest reviewer isn't nervous about perceived collusion with them; nor is she worried about being deceived by manufacturers implied to like nothing better than an incompetent review.
If an outlet relies on marketing freebies for its content, however, this kind of paranoia is inevitable. Perhaps this accounts for the page-long introductory preamble from Hexus establishing the heights of its own credibility. This explosive and public chemical reaction between their editorial coverage and Alienware's marketing department is certainly a poor way of demonstrating it.
To Alienware, reviews are a form of marketing. As a reviewer, pretending otherwise is fine, but to complain about it with such venom is just not cricket: you chose this business. It's a sense of entitlement taken to a ludicrous extreme.
Would a book reviewer take Penguin Putnam's refusal to send books as an "astonishing threat?" Would a restaurant critic feel their livelihood was at stake should a chef boot them out of a restaurant? Hexus might be right, in a general moral sense, but their passive-aggressive, vengeful takedown of Alienware's marketroids isn't a particularly satisfying way of expressing this point.
If anything, it reveals that Hexus knows its self-image as a dispassionate hardware critic is belied by the fact all the credibility in the world will never change manufacturers' perception of them as just another free advertising service.
Your job is to rise above this, not behave like jackasses when you find out about it.
Even a creature from outer space should know you can't buy a good review on HEXUS [Hexus.net]
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