Of the thousands who responded to our recent report on the flood of experts fleeing the horrific leadership at Consumer Reports, one longtime CR subscriber kindly gave us permission to share with the public the following e-mail they sent to CR’s President, Marta Tellado. (According to this email’s author, the “website” they refer to below is this site, StateoftheNet.net)

To: marta.tellado@consumer.org

Subject: As a Long-time Subscriber…

…I’d been wondering about the gradual decline in quality of CR products: The magazine seems to be aiming toward “hip,” rather than factual, and reports now tend to focus on the cosmetics rather than the underlying design and manufacturing quality of products.

For example, I recently bought a new humidifier for a bedroom, because a family member is recovering from surgery. I discovered several things:   #1: You give high scores to products I have examined in stores; those scores are simply not credible. #2: Your CR Recommendations were, when I searched the Internet, among the worst quality as reported by actual customers reviewing products at sites like Amazon. So, I trusted the aggregate opinions of actual buyers of the products and bought a product you hadn’t even included in your reviews…and I am exceptionally happy.

Clearly, ordinary “netizens” are doing better at reviewing products than CR. That means my subscription fees are being wasted on your declining quality.

Then, I stumbled across a website from a former employee. It is written in the style of the old CR I used to revere: Factual, evidence cited backing up facts, and a frank assessment of the root drivers for the conclusions. THAT impressed me. It’s a shame that you’re going for cheap labor instead of best professionals.

If I continue to see this trend in CR toward gloss and façade, rather than concrete evidence, I WILL cancel my subscriptions, both to the print magazine and the website. That way, you have one less dupe paying you for information of declining quality and relevance.

How you can send an e-mail to CR’s President

Click here to send Ms. Tellado an e-mail. This will also send a CC to a special StateoftheNet.net e-mail address so that we can read your comments, though you can easily remove that CC before sending. We will not make public anyone’s e-mail comments without the prior permission of that person.