8.10.2009

A One Man Iso Booth

Paul Carr over at TechCrunch just published this rant on unreliable sources. His point: If you lie to me off the record, and I find out, I'll consider it on the record and out you as a liar. Maybe that's a good idea if you have a lot of influence, so people want to go to you to the exclusion of others. I don't know Paul - perhaps he has this power. I know that if I did this, I'd simply be turning of the source spigot. That's bad, because from the source flows the information that becomes a scoop. Didn't we used to pay journalists to sniff out the BS? Oh, right. We used to pay journalists.

2 comments:

Ari E-B said...

We don't have journalists anymore - we only have reporters.

Anonymous said...

Off the record sources are a big problem - specifically, that folks can whine and moan anonymously and then get taken seriously as sources for stories.

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