Seattle Business Monthly: Oops.

I'd been getting Washington CEO magazine, since it's free, and with this month's issue they've merged with Seattle Business Monthly. It's a telling sign of the economic times when even the CEOs can't afford to keep their magazine subscriptions up.

Anyhow, the editor's note from Jeffery Bond had this quote:

The state's budget deficit for the next biennium may grow to $6 billion, forcing the Legislature to make major program cuts and, while no one seems willing to admit it, almost assuredly some form of tax increase.

...which is pretty notable in its own right to see, given the forum it appeared in.

Then I went to their web site to see if I could find an electronic copy, but what I found instead regarding their cover boy was even more fun:

When we decided to profile Terry Drayton and put him on the cover of our January issue, we had no idea that he would become so prominent so soon and for all the wrong reasons.

As many of you know, Drayton, best known for founding Homegrocer.com, was a co-founder and CEO of a small Bellevue-based company called the Arena Group, which runs a software firm called Count Me In. This firm produces software to manage sports leagues of all types, including handling the registration and collection of fees for Little Leagues and soccer leagues across the country.

On Dec. 11, three weeks after our issue had been sent to the printer, we were stunned to hear that Count Me In was being sued in federal court by a New Jersey soccer club that claimed the company failed to turn over $142,000 in registration payments. Since then, we have been contacted by parents from local baseball leagues to say that they, too, have lost tens of thousands of dollars in registration fees.

Neither the writer of the profile nor anyone on our staff had any idea while the article was being prepared for publication that there was a problem with Count Me In’s procedures or that Little League organizations around the country were facing the possibility of losing their registration fees.

It kind of reminds me of this, or the Weekly World News publishing autopsy photos of Timothy McVeigh without considering that his execution date could get postponed and that when they published these pictures of him dead he could still be, you know, very much alive.

Oops!