There is quite the ethics flap going on over the last 72 hours or so about TechCrunch’s handling of leaked Twitter documents.
Looming questions: Is Michael Arrington wrong to distribute any of the leaked material, which a hacker stole? Is the posting of the documentation unconscionable? Is there journalistic excuse, or justification for it?
Now this is storytelling and the right way to use social media tools. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first manned Apollo moon landing by essentially rebroadcasting the event. This may go down as the mother of all reruns.
Every picture tells a story. Apple presented this one during the October 2008 launch of unibody MacBook Pros. So many Macs among so many students seems outta sorts. Where are the Windows laptops? The students and Mac laptops go so oddly together.
The essential problem with the newspaper business today is that it is suffering from a huge imbalance between supply and demand. What the Internet has done is broken the geographical constraints on news distribution and flooded the market with stories, with product. Supply so far exceeds demand that the price of the news has dropped to zero…
Blogging is a fun, and it’s a great way for creating community across many different types of boundaries. Some bloggers have influence, too, as evidenced by the Sony rootkit DRM or Thomas Hawk’s PriceRightPhoto debacle. But for all the talk about bloggers changing information dissemination and even some bloggers deserving press credentials, the real influence, the credibility remains with real journalists.
And New York Times has done some great investigative journalism of late. Two big stories from the last week—the kind of stuff that requires real reporting and deep editorial soul searching: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without Courts” and “Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World“.
I have been pondering the implications behind Microsoft’s Channel 9 blogsite. The deal: Last week, Microsoft developer evangelists put up Channel 9, which is supposed to provider developers with “a way to listen to the cockpit of Microsoft”. Apparently, the listening includes dispensing Microsoft news and inside views.
The timing is interesting. Channel 9’s official launch occurred during Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) event, which makes much sense considering the site is for partners. But the debut also came a couple days before Business Week published a story saying that Microsoft was in the process of trimming next-generation-Windows Longhorn features to make a 2006 ship date. The story also offered up details about other upcoming stops on the Windows roadmap, such as something called Windows XP Premium, which soon will ship on new PCs.