1: Someone breaks a story 2: People get interested and share it with their friends 3: Other sources want a piece of that action so they bandwagon and cite the original piece for their own version.
I am often struck at how our modern communications framework, going all the way back to the telegraph, has allowed so much misinformation to be spread.
Also, because Google promotes blogspam without any regard for content quality (see the "freshness algorithm"), you lose money by spending longer on a post.
It's the exception rather than the rule that somebody will come along several days later and hit it out of the park, but well done Jason Koebler.
Vice doesn't necessarily fall out of that category either. Smack dab in the middle is the statement:
"I still had outstanding questions, which I asked Apple ... The company has not yet responded."
The number of times I've read a developing story that has had that or similar in it is countless. Apple isn't known to have an army of PR representatives waiting for the next question to come down the pipeline, but it begs the question of how long they waited before publishing the story and just hoping they can update the story later while it's still getting pageviews.
Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument.
I understand what you're getting at, but Apple loses nothing by having the original story misreported—it ends up looking really good. Apple just straight up ignores reporters, all the time.
On one hand I get how secrecy works well for Apple, but on the other it gives them less control over Crystallizing Public Opinion and occasionally results in some pretty weak ads for uninspired product(s/ updates), like the 5s parts all coming together: beautiful but meaningless.
The rest of us are generally ignored, so we have to pick up scraps from the chosen few.
Obviously the big titles get more attention than small ones -- nobody has an infinite supply of time -- but companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel cope with dozens if not hundreds of journalists worldwide. They even deal with journalists that they think view them unfavorably.
24 hours isn't terribly long, though knowing how fast Apple responds, if you don't get one in 12, then you probably won't get one in 72 either. For other companies though, what is a general grace period before moving forward with publication?
Much in the same way that police abuse has been going on forever but didn't get attention until everyone got a camera in their phone, I think bullshit "news" stories have always been with us. The net makes it much easier to debunk these, and for the news of the debunking to spread in the same way the original story did.
That's not to say the insatiable, screwed up incentives to publish on the net before fact checking aren't problematic. I just question whether shoddy/misleading/outright false "news" has actually gotten worse, or whether we just notice it more because corrections and factchecks in some cases become news in their own right (like here).
The OP article just says that the thing everyone's saying about 'Apple harvests gold from iPhones and makes $40 million" just isn't true.
It's not a question of 'controversy', it's a question of understanding what's actually going on in the world regarding our resource consumption and waste generation and where the costs of such are borne -- something we probably need to be more familiar with if we want to keep living on this planet.
For about two days after it was published, I got calls from various lesser-known news outlets, and in the end, I did two more interviews, one with a local television station, and one with a very small radio talk show.
I didn't feel that any of the three organizations got the nuances and details right in their final stories. The WSJ got the big picture mostly right, but made it look like I took a different angle than I did; the local news station intentionally omitted important facts to drive some humor. The radio program was a live interview, but moved on to the next question so quickly that I didn't have a chance to give much detail.
I don't think any of this was avoiding fact-checking, or misrepresenting the truth of my story. But accurate reporting is very hard, and no news outlet gets it right.
Ever since then, I take every story I see with a grain of salt. The main point might be what the subject thinks, but at the very least it is missing details and nuance.
This leads me to treat the subject of any news story with a lot more compassion than it may seem like they deserve on the surface.
Motherboard scored the best among the Vice verticals but not well in the grand scheme of things.