Per Your Request …

An advisor told me to write this story. I was at a gathering of Commonwealth Financial’s top advisors, and this gentleman suggested we write a particular kind of article in the magazine. He then caught himself, saying, “But your advertisers would be angry” if we did run such an article. I explained how we (the editors at Investment Advisor and ThinkAdvisor.com) regularly run afoul of our advertisers and other companies in the financial services industry over what we publish and what we don’t publish. I related to this advisor some recent events showing the true relationship between what we call “editorial” and companies in the industry.

For example, one company recently asked us to make some changes to an article that had been published a year ago. “Compliance” at said company requested that we change some of the language in the story, and in particular change or delete some quotes made by the lead proponent in the article of an approach sponsored by the company.

First, I admit that we are fallible at Investment Advisor. We make mistakes. We get numbers wrong. We miss typos and misspellings. So when a reader points out errors of fact or style, we are more than happy to make corrections. It doesn’t happen all that often, but we do publish many columns, feature stories, news articles and blogs over the course of a day, a month, a year. While we strive to limit mistakes, and won’t tolerate writers who make such mistakes in their reporting or writing, we know some will slip through. When notified of an error, we fix it.

However, “fixing” quotes is a different matter. There’s a funny thing about human beings: When we see our own utterances in print, we are often unsatisfied or disappointed. We say to ourselves, “Hmm, I could have said that better. I should have mentioned that company or that person in my response. I should have sounded smarter.”