There’s been quite the foofaraw surrounding the leak of the latest iPhone prototype (Spoiler: one of the employees left it at a bar, a guy found it, Gizmodo bought it from him and posted a teardown). It’s the expected incremental upgrade scheduled for release this summer that continues the process of making the iPhone more like what people thought it was going to be when it released, making the ballyhoo surrounding the story even bigger than the story itself.
First of all, journalists post stories. Believe it or not (given many “mainstream” organizations), they’re not simply dissemination vehicles for industry press releases. If you have a scoop you don’t have to politely inform Apple that you have a deliciously interesting story and wouldn’t they mind if you ran it, pretty please?
It fascinates me how quickly others have been to demonize Giz. At least according to them, the guy who originally found it tried to return it and got nothing but a customer service ticket number for his efforts. He sold it (essentially selling the story) to Gizmodo, and when Apple asked for it back (confirming that it was real) they did so.
What more could you possibly want? A news organization serves its community, not corporate un-persons. They’re not a lost-and-found service tasked with ensuring that Apple “didn’t want it back” before writing the story. Even if it had been stolen originally, so what? That’s on the thief’s conscience (and legal record), not on a press organization who neither commissioned nor endorsed the action (and regardless, seemed to do a decent job verifying that it was lost, not stolen at all).
I don’t see people like Andy Ihnatko or David Caolo and the TUAW crew getting self-righteous when Pam Landy faxes the Blackbriar documents to the press (whoops, spoiled that for you), or secret government documents or videos show up on Wikileaks. I suppose it’s okay because these folks are classed as “good guys.”
This situation doesn’t strike me as being any different, unless a virtual kerfuffle allays their disappointment at not having the story themselves. They should be focusing instead on why it’s taken three years to get an iPhone with a front-facing camera.
2 responses to “iShenanigans”
I agree this has all been blown way out of proportion. I think some of the fault does lie on Gizmodo though, for not being clear at first as to how they acquired such a device. Had they come out with the full story from the start, things might have gone a lot differently.
I agree, it was amateurish on their part to be less-than-forthcoming, though it is easy to see how an excited tech blogger could neglect that information in the excitement of posting an exclusive.
Something makes me wonder, though, if we wouldn’t be seeing this snark even if they had.