It seems that the battle between the New York Times and the highly regarded tech blog, TechCrunch, has come to sharp jabs. The New York Times has declared that blogs are nothing more than rumors and essentially, bring about fear for no reason at all. Such as the time Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple was reported to have suffered a heart attack when he was in perfect health. At the same time, the bloggers argue that it’s about saying things that you hear and going with it.
Blogging is about being real. TechCrunch replies by saying that they stated in the blogs that the rumors were indeed rumors, but they were newsworthy enough to be blogged about because that was the “scuttlebutt” at the time. They never falsely reported anything because they made no attempt to hide the fact that it was indeed a rumor.
Tech Crunch then stated that their form of news produces more results because more people are ready to defend rumors that have been posted on a major source and will then give up information to dispute the rumor. The process leads to better news in the end, instead of waiting until they try to talk to everyone involved, who usually don’t want to talk about rumors. They also brought up examples of the New York Times messing up major stories in which they were called out by major people and had to go back and reprint the stories. So in essence, they did the same thing that blogs do and had to update.
TechCrunch maintains that they have “100% transparency” and that’s what their readers like, while the New York Times has time to rewrite stories before they officially say anything at all. Blogs are similar to neighborhood or office chatter, and we’ve all had a part in some of that. You know that it could be true and that it could be false, but you still talk about it and have an opinion and it gets people talking. This then forces the object of rumors to dispute or agree with it and then everything is really put to bed. You can decide what kind of news is better for you, as we know, no one can ever agree on anything.
needless to say, techcrunch is in the right, while the one-time paper of record NYT continues to show why they no longer qualify as a journalistic institution.
only fools believe blog rumors. only idiots believe anything in the post-judy-miller NYT.