Arguing that the media shouldn't publish factual information because it impacts a company's bottom line is a dangerous argument, even (especially) if the company affected is one that you like.
[T]here are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race for priority... [such scoops] are structurally similar to “breaking news” but they don’t have any real value.
Revealing what’s in the next iPhone is a Type 2 scoop: everyone was going to find out this information as soon as the product was actually released, so Gizmodo didn’t provide much of a public service by publishing it ahead of schedule.
If journalists didn’t get so much attention paid to their Type 2 scoops then maybe they’d devote more resources to breaking Type 1 scoops.
(Disclaimer of interest: My startup was recently bought by Nokia, which, duh, competes with Apple in the smartphone market.)
I could be completely mistaken on that though.
It also leaves open the question of how someone can be clever enough to realize the importance of what he'd found and clever enough to know who to sell it to and how much to sell it for, but not clever enough to figure out how to contact the guy who lost it even though he knew the location where it was lost, knew the guy's name and had visited the guy's Facebook page.