he new iPhone will be called the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 4S, and it will come in one, two, or three models, with one being a smaller, cheaper device, or not. It will have NFC, unless it doesn’t. It will be slimmer, or not, and have an edge-to-edge screen, unless that’s not true. That new phone will come out in August, September, or 2012.
Is this nonsense of any value to anyone?
I’m getting physically sick of the nonstop iPhone rumor mill, which is spewing out contradictory information on a daily basis at this point. Between the end of February and now, we’ve published 35 iphone 5 rumor stories, many of which directly contradict each other, almost all of which are based on dead-end, anonymous sources or on very tenuous leaps of logic. My editor even forced me to put an iphone 5 rumor slideshow in this story!
Toiling in the Rumor Mill
Where are these rumors coming from? They’re coming from “well-placed sources in AT&T Mobility,” “unnamed people briefed on Apple’s plans,” “unnamed sources at Apple’s suppliers,” “people familiar with the situation,” “one of Apple’s suppliers,” “yet another key component supplier,” “upstream component makers,” “industry sources,” or, my favorite, “a reliable source.”
These un-sources frequently get laundered through financial analysts from firms with impressive names, so the analysts can get their names in the news and so we reporters can all feel better about attaching a name to a story. But just because we’re citing somebody from Morgan Stanley or Piper Jaffray doesn’t mean we’re not responsible for writing another story based only on “industry checks.” What is an “industry check,” anyway?
Then there are the rumors based on things that analysts feel should happen, reported as fact. Here we get Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore asserting Apple needs to make a cheaper iPhone (just because he thinks so) and Piper Jaffray’s Chris Larsen saying the iPhone should come to Sprint and T-Mobile (because he says it’s a good idea.) Somehow, when ground through the rumor mill, these suggestions read as predictions.
Suggestions vs. Predictions vs. Rumors
I make suggestions, too (for instance, calling for Nokia to not drop MeeGo for Windows Phone), but at least my suggestions don’t appear to be predictions. Or at least they shouldn’t. But unlike my jabber-jawing self, stock analysts actually get people to bet money based on their suggestions/predictions, so they have to appear much more confident than I do.
There’s a place for stories based on anonymous sources. When I was a baby journalist, my mentors gave me a rule that if I could assemble three anonymous sources for a story, I could run that story. It’s better to get the information out there, even if the sources aren’t willing to be quoted. My reputation would ride on the result.
But the Internet’s link culture has turned this into empty rumormongering. Maybe analyst so-and-so has two good sources for his info. He can run with the story. But everyone else who then links to and cites and digests his story doesn’t know who his sources are. We’re taking bald assertions on faith, which is exactly what journalists aren’t supposed to do. That’s not just about our pride: our whole job is to tell people what’s true, which we can’t do if we can’t verify the sources.
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