The Fight for Your Trust
I’ve been mentally sawing on this post for a few days now, debating whether to put it up at all. It may get me in more hot water than it’s worth, and it’s a bit of inside baseball about the boating journalism business that may not be exactly what you come to read here every day on the Editor’s Blog.
But I’ve decided to go ahead in the interest of letting you readers know just how challenging it can be to tell you the truth about charter yachts here on CharterWave.
As you might imagine, I am quite friendly with most of the marketing directors and charter fleet managers around the world. I see them at boat shows pretty much every month of the year, I’ve cruised onboard boats with many of them, and I rely on them to give me information and access so that I can get onboard the charter yachts that they control. They sometimes ask me for favors, like providing a photo or two for their catalogs. Often, I oblige with no qualms at all.
But the favor that was asked of me earlier this week, I had to refuse. It came from a marketing director who asked me to remove an earlier post from this blog–one that criticized the owner of a charter yacht for trying to control and sanitize every single word that gets written about his boat.
What I said in my post was that you, the reader, should keep a wary eye out for owners like this, because if they’re so controlling that they can’t handle an honest evaluation of their yacht by a journalist like me, then they just may show that same controlling streak should anything go wrong during your charter onboard their boat.
The marketing director didn’t question the legitimacy or accuracy of my post. Instead, the request to remove it came because the yacht’s owner might stumble upon it and get upset while surfing the Web.
Many magazines, even some of the ones where you might see my byline, abide by these kinds of requests (or they self-censor everything in the first place) to stay in the marketing directors’ good graces–and keep their advertising revenue coming in. That’s why it’s awfully hard to find a printed story anywhere that says anything other than “This is the greatest charter yacht in the world.”
I have decided to take what I consider the more honorable, ethical path and leave the post up for you readers, even if it means I’ll never get a dime in advertising from this particular (and highly reputable) company.
Why? Because I think that CharterWave is truly the only resource in the world right now, online or in print, where you can find honest and complete editorial evaluations about charter yachts, brokers, companies, and industry issues–and I want to keep it that way more than I want to acquiesce to people with big advertising budgets.
CharterWave’s readership continues to grow primarily because we do our best to tell the truth. Readers tell me that they come to CharterWave–and come back to us again and again–because they read our articles and know that we are writing for them, and not for yacht owners or marketing managers. Our information helps them decide which charter yachts to book, and which brokers to work with. They need us to be forthright.
Hence my decision to stand behind my blog post, even at the risk of upsetting a marketing director whose company, frankly, I’d love to have as an advertiser here on the site. As I told this valued colleague, the yacht’s owner has every right to be upset about my post–but it’s written as a consequence of his own actions, and I have every right to discuss how he treats journalists like me. As I said before, this window into the owner’s psyche could have ramifications on how he treats you charter clients out there. And you deserve to know about it if you’re considering booking a vacation onboard.
CharterWave exists for the nearly 55,000 readers (and growing daily) who visit each year. I have planted that flag firmly, and I’m going to continue to fly it proudly.
Eventually, I hope, charter yacht owners and marketing managers will see the benefit of having you as an audience for their advertising–precisely because you know a good thing from a fake thing when you see it.