From: RobertB 

In article ,
 Rich Gauszka  wrote:

> 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:
>
>      üThis 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,ý
> 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.

Be nice if bloggers waited first and checked their sources. Based on this,
Engadget is very much at fault.

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