Scanner:
Do they still have a forearm fetish in these magazines? It’s common knowledge that the bigger your arms, shorter your hair and the more tattoos you have, the more likely you are to get featured in T&D.
and that’s just the women!
Seriously, Rikki has a point.
You can publish facts (providing they are true and can be substantiated), you may well get taken to court, but you are likely to be able to mount an effective defence.
You can publish ‘opinion’ and providing that it is honestly held and presented as an opinion ‘in my view’ for instance, and providing that you don’t have another motive (ie working for a rival company) then you can defend yourself as making ‘fair comment’ even if you are wrong.
Road testers, Parkers etc can either make it clear that they are presenting an opinion “I found the Togoba Cyclone to be noisy and uncomfortable” or they can present fact “The build quality of the Togoba is appalling,” but be prepared to back it with hard evidence (in the first year of production there were 120 safety related recalls on the Togoba Cyclone).
In law, the author (poster) and the publisher (Rikki and his employers) can both get sued.
So he’s protecting you as well as himself.
In the years I edited a transport magazine we got occasional angry calls from truck manufacturers about things we had written…they sometimes cancelled advertising too. Sometimes they threatened to cancel ads they hadn’t even booked, which was quite funny.
We also used to get complaints about articles that had appeared in other magazines, and complaints from people who clearly hadn’t even read the article in question. On a bus and coach magazine I even had a complaint from an operator about a report we had published about his appearance at a public inquiry. It turned out that the guy couldn’t read (!), but he just didn’t think we should have written about him at all. All of which was funny, but also a bit of a waste of time.
