Friday, May 18, 2007

Engadget, Apple, and the anonymice

Blog Blunder: Nothing New

One of my favorite tech blogs fell flat on its face Wednesday. Engadget posted a story yesterday claiming the expected June launch of the iPhone would be delayed until October and the Leopard October debut would be postponed until January. Engadget's credited its source as coming from an internal Apple e-mail.

The e-mail tip turned out to be false. But before anyone figured this out Apple's stock tumbled 3 percent losing $4 billion in value by the end of the trading day.


If your source doesn’t want their name on a story, why would you want yours? How many times are reporters, working in whatever medium, going to let themselves get burned by anonymous sources before they learn to reject them?

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