Video: Engadget’s Apple Crisis and my policy/thoughts on news reporting

Late this morning, Engadget posted a story about the Apple iPhone being delayed which turned out to be a fake email. Mike notes that in this short period of time, the Apple (AAPL) stock lost $4 billion in market cap. The stock eventually all but recovered by the end of the day but many investors lost (and some gained) on the short dip.

So what does this show? This clearly shows that blogs can impact financials. I have no idea what kind of investigating Engadget did on this story, I have to assume they did some before posting. But, in general, something that frustrates me is blogs that run with stories to be "first" without investigating the source and the facts. It's so easy to post today, it's almost instant. So an email of news can be received by a blog and turned into a story in mere seconds. Maybe it's my financial background but this will eventually cause some hurt to some blogs, especially smaller ones who don't have the large legal teams like AOL does.

Since today it's appears to be more important to be first than right, it's run, run, run. This happens in all blog genres where breaking a story can mean a Digg, a listing on the larger news sites and loads of inbound juicy links. So many times, writers/journalists/bloggers forget to think first.

Do all stories need the same level of due diligence? No. This Engadget story is a good example of a high risk level story. My policy on CN is clear: We won't post a story without confirming it to the level needed first. It means we might not be first, but we will do our best job to be right. And please understand, we may still be wrong. Though I will be able to show the due diligence we performed.

I took a look at the ATT stock (symbol T) to see if they saw any change based on the story but didn't see any change of importance.

Check out my video commentary below: