From: "Mark" 

"Within minutes, some people who read the post were selling their
Apple stock,"

Fools.

It has nothing to do with "bloggers" vs. "legitimate"
reporting, it goes to common sense and 2nd sourcing everything -- blogs are
more often a 2nd source for what the real story is, but it can work in
reverse just as well (and that direction will become more commonplace if
the MSM wants to survive).

Bloggers are like the pamphleteers of yore, you have to follow them and
evaluate them on an individual basis -- sure there's going to be erroneous
material from many (even most if you will) but once you have a feel for a
particular guy's point of view you can easily parse what makes sense and
what doesn't 


"Rich Gauszka"  wrote in
message news:464ce95f$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>
> blogger power?
>
> http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/did_anyone_else.htm
l
>
> It's stories like this that make bloggers cringe. Yesterday, tech blog
> Engadget received supposed insider information about a delay of the iPhone
> until October, and another delay for Leopard, pushing the new OS to
> January of 2008. Duty bound to report to its readers, it filed a post.
> Within minutes, some people who read the post were selling their Apple
> stock, which dipped 3% in mid-day trading yesterday. The origin of the
> information was an internal Apple memo...which turned out to be fake. Fake
> or not, Apple's market capitalization sunk by $4 billion once the memo
> became public.
>
> Some are crying for an SEC investigation. According to a Business 2.0
> blog, one shareholder sold 5 million shares within 10 to 15 minutes of
> seeing the post. The post was based on this language seen in the fake
> memo:
>
>     Apple issued a press release today announcing that iPhone which was
> scheduled to ship in June, has been moved to October and the release date
> for Mac OS X Leopard has been moved to January next year.
>
> Apparently the email came from what Engadget calls a "trusted
source" and
> was delivered from within Apple's internal email system, giving it the air
> of authenticity. Apple discovered the fake email quickly and 90 minutes
> later sent out a real email explaining that the first one was a fake:
>
>     “This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on
> track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October,” said
> Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris.
>
> Too late. The damage had already been done. Luckily, the turmoil was
> brief. The stock recovered most of its value by the end of the day (it
> closed down 0.17%). There are still a lot of questions that remain
> unanswered. Who really sent the memo? How did they do it from within the
> Apple system? Did they hack in? We can only assume that Apple is hunting
> down the responsible party and will take appropriate action once that
> person is found.
>
> As a blogger, it's often hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in the
> online world, especially when "scooping" the competition is
top of mind.
> From Engadget's point of view, I can understand why they would put up
> their original post based on the supposed good quality source material.
> What are bloggers to do, however, when fed erroneous information that
> looks real? Their gut instinct is to post first, question later. Lessons
> learned in Journalism 101, however, would have prevented the debacle. It
> never hurts to pick up the phone and call a company rep to confirm the
> validity of the information. Will this delay the story? Sure. But in the
> end, accuracy is more important than being the first to report a story.

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