There are some interesting journalism questions that arise out of Gizmodo’s major scoop on the iPhone 4G. Quick wrap: Gizmodo paid $5,000 for what appears to be a lost iPhone 4G. (A letter from Apple to Gizmodo pretty much eliminates any question about the device’s authenticity.) Apparently one of the iPhone developers left it in a bar (d’oh!) and Gizmodo acquired it. Later, amid plenty of questions about the veracity of the story, Gizmodo wrote a new post, this one mentioning the name of the developer who lost the phone. So we get not one nor two but three Journalism Questions here:
1. Was Gizmodo right to pay for the phone?
2. Was Gizmodo right in running the story without confirmation that it, indeed, had the iPhone 4G?
3. Should Gizmodo have named the person who lost the phone?
Very interested in hearing what the LR Faithful think of this one. There’s no question this is a scoop… do you agree with how Gizmodo handled it?
UPDATE 4/20: Some of your thoughts, as written in the comments:
Kevin doesn’t like how Gizmodo acquired the device: “They bought something from someone they knew belonged to someone else. That is surely a crime. Now if they’d just been given it it would be a different matter, they didn’t. They paid for it.”
J.C. Burns writes: “(Gizmodo’s) actions are about as far removed from journalism as I can imagine… If this is a story about a corporation doing wrong somewhere—if its intent was to reveal something about Apple’s vendor’s labor practices in China, for example, then I’d be a lot more open to unnamed sources and deceptive-ish approaches to get at corporate secrets.”
DeRushaJ writes: “Should they have named the person who lost the phone? No. That was really a sideshow to the story. What’s the difference who the phone-loser is? Should they have named the person who sold them the phone? I think so. That goes to motivation, authenticity, and would have been useful to know.”
Piggy rightly asks for clarification regarding the term 4G, which has come to mean both “the fourth-generation iPhone” and the “new 4G speedier wireless internet” now being rolled out. In the case of the new iPhone, 4G will refer to the model, unless noted otherwise.
Steve evidently supports Gizmodo’s purchase: “$5k was a bargain. Gizmodo is getting play all over the net today.”
Dayton writes: “Gizmodo’s action amounts to bribery and theft, and publicly outing the engineer who misplaced the iPhone was utterly reprehensible. I don’t think it will hurt Apple’s bottom line significantly but the engineer’s career is irrevocably, needlessly and cruelly damaged.”
And “Steve Jobs” (hiya!) takes LR for task for even running the story: “Three silly questions from you, trying to pump news-related traffic to your site… Such a humbug over how Gizmodo runs their site, when the story is at Gizmodo, not at lostremote.com … sorry guys. This was a lame set of questions to ask.”
I’ll stand by asking the questions. We have a long history of raising questions of ethical journalism and seeing what good can come from the debate. We’re not a traffic-driven site, we’re audience-driven. So extra page views don’t help us, save perhaps for our egos. What we consider important and relevant is the idea of checkbook journalism and “outing” a person who, it would appear, accidentally caused a major leak of one of the world’s most popular tech products.
