The Morality And Effectiveness Of Process Journalism

The New York Times Sunday edition team picks fights like no one else. The problem is they tend to pick the wrong fights. And mask opinion pieces as straight up factual articles.

In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the time that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue this year. Then there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That article was retitled and rewritten to correct errors and change the overall tone.

I can't help wondering if our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, this time aimed squarely at us. Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong, he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face.

When Damon reached out to me by email to talk about the story, I wrote back something along the lines of "The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me" because of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they've decided to write. But Damon persisted, saying "I want to call you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors." Seemed fair enough, I have lots of thoughts on that subject.

We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can't be trusted, at all.

Damon was laser focused in the article on a post we ran talking partially about Apple/Twitter acquisition rumors. Here's that post: Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up. Damon says:

Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sites and retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, ?The trouble is we?ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.?But they reported it anyway. ?I don?t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,? said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

Damon is suggesting that I reported the rumor as if it were real, and waited until deep into the post to say anything about it being unlikely. 133 words into it!

The fact is we didn't talk about the rumor until the third paragraph of that story, and the statement about it being unlikely to be true came immediately after the sentence that stated the rumor:

Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. ?Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,? said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we?ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.

There's just no way to interpret this paragraph as a cheap way to get traffic by misleading readers. We say exactly what we were hearing, and what we believe to be true. And by the way, it shouldn't matter, but we've subsequently confirmed that Apple and Twitter were in fact in acquisition discussions, and the original source for our story was correct.

The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context: