3 ms·
Arguing that the media shouldn't publish factual information because it impacts a company's bottom line is a dangerous argument, even (especially) if the compan
by sunir 17y ago
Arguing that the media shouldn't publish factual information because it impacts a company's bottom line is a dangerous argument, even (especially) if the company affected is one that you like.
- Qz 17y agoIt's a load of shit is what it is.
- baddox 17y agoVery true. I agree that plastering the Apple employee's info all over the place was tacky, but I see nothing wrong with publishing their story. People love it when wikileaks breaks huge stories involving governments, armies, and corporations, but they get upset when a (lackluster and predictable) Apple secret gets leaked by a tech/gadget journalism website. I personally enjoy both.
- FlorinAndrei 17y agoAgreed. Publishing the story about the device, fine. But it takes a real d-bag to leak the name of the engineer who lost it.
- danudey 17y agoWell I'll agree with you there, but arguing that the media shouldn't publish factual information gleaned from a prototype that they bought knowing it was stolen while flaunting their disregard for the law just to rub Apple's nose in it is something I can get behind.
- loupgarou21 17y agoI'll admit that I haven't been following this story very closely, but I was under the impression that an employee at Apple accidentally left the phone at a bar, someone found the phone, tried to return it to Apple, but kept getting the run-around while on the phone with them, so eventually he gave up on trying to return it and he ended up selling it to gizmodo instead. I could be completely mistaken on that though.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y agoWell, that's certainly the story as Gizmodo reports it. Unfortunately it comes from a source with plenty of reason to lie about the details, and can't be verified as nobody outside of Gizmodo knows who that source is. It also leaves open the question of how someone can be clever enough to realize the importance of what he'd found and clever enough to know who to sell it to and how much to sell it for, but not clever enough to figure out how to contact the guy who lost it even though he knew the location where it was lost, knew the guy's name and had visited the guy's Facebook page.
- Herring 17y agoDangerous in what sense? He's making an ethical argument, not a legal or economic argument, as you're implying. It's all gossip, unlike (say) wikileaks.
- sethg 17y agoA certain political blogger, in another context (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/the-fifteen-minutes-problem.php http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/the-fifte...), remarked: [T]here are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race for priority... [such scoops] are structurally similar to “breaking news” but they don’t have any real value. Revealing what’s in the next iPhone is a Type 2 scoop: everyone was going to find out this information as soon as the product was actually released, so Gizmodo didn’t provide much of a public service by publishing it ahead of schedule. If journalists didn’t get so much attention paid to their Type 2 scoops then maybe they’d devote more resources to breaking Type 1 scoops. (Disclaimer of interest: My startup was recently bought by Nokia, which, duh, competes with Apple in the smartphone market.)