“Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap.
Get the Tech Scuttlebutt! (It Might Even Be True.)
Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade. In October, for instance, Silicon Alley Insider discussed a rumor that first appeared in a “citizen journalism†section of the CNN Web site that Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, had had a heart attack. He hadn’t.
The truth-be-damned approach recalls an earlier era of newspapering that was memorialized in the movie classic “Citizen Kane.†The main character, modeled on the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, is told that a writer sent to Cuba to report a war can find no war. “You provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war,†Kane replies.
W. Joseph Campbell, who chronicled the newspaper wars at the turn of the last century in a book titled “Yellow Journalism,†says, “It was far more freewheeling than they are today.†More than a dozen major dailies fought for an audience in New York City, but gradually papers embraced credibility to survive. “It may have meant some of the newspapers lost a lot of their pizazz,†he notes. (Mr. Campbell, who is an associate professor at the School of Communication at American University, also researched the origins of the “Citizen Kane†quotation and concluded that it was unlikely that Mr. Hearst uttered a similar phrase.)
