June 7th, 2005
Who broke the Apple news? Better yet, who predicted it.
Dan Gillmor has rightly picked apart a scoop conspiracy on the Apple-Intel story. He notes how, in the process of undeservedly patting itself on the back, the Wall Street Journal quoted Steve Jobs as saying "Most of you are hearing about this for the first time, unless you read The Wall Street Journal." during his keynote presentation at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. On the grounds that there’s no official criteria for separating certifiable journalists from uncertifiable journalists, Gillmor has zinged Jobs numerous times for his legal assault on the Web sites that have revealed several Apple trade secrets. He thinks that Jobs’ should have cited CNET News.com as the news organization that actually confirmed the news ahead of the developer conference rather than citing the WSJ which only published a report of an Apple-Intel rumor. [Disclosure: News.com is a sister organization to ZDNet]
There’s a bit of irony in this story since the WSJ appears to be taking credit for getting a scoop — something professional journalists traditionally never do if all they have is a report of a rumor. Perhaps Columbia Journalism Review will give the WSJ a dart for a bit of undeserved self-aggrandizing instead of correcting Jobs. More importantly, the Apple-Intel rumor is one of the oldest in the industry. If you’re looking for the first prediction to say it was actually going to happen, then look no further than David Coursey. In August of 2002, he predicted it would happen in the next 18 months. OK, so he was off by 10 months (not bad for this business).
