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Comment by mcav | Hacker News Reader

That's the right way to address mistakes. Gruber could have said nothing of the error, or he could have turned on his source. Instead, he took the time to investigate the error. That's class. Journalists take note.

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+1 for admitting screwed up, -10 for laying it off on his single source. Why didn't he second-source it, like real journalists do?

I can't imagine well-sourced rumors are all that commonplace about a company as secretive as Apple. Probably you have to go with what you're given on the rare occasions you get precious little anything at all.

I could live with that, if Gruber didn't make a point of serving up "claim chowder" every time someone else rushed to print a juicy tidbit without checking the facts. If you are going to throw stones...

I agree that in general Gruber has well-researched and thoughtful pieces. I would have more respect for his retraction if he didn't spend most of it telling me why it wasn't his fault.

"But, trust me, it was AT&T’s decision."

and then

"My source [...] was wrong."

You're implicitly giving a lot of credit to the stories he calls out as 'claim chowder'. They're pretty much always unsourced bs speculation from hacks and trolls who would never call attention to their own mistakes.

Not many real journalists have even one source as reliable as Gruber's has been.

Is a leak like this something that a journalist could get a second source for?

Absolutely, that's why they get a second source. But you can run with a single leak as long as it's positioned as such and you give the other party a chance to respond. I don't recall how it was mentioned in the original article.

Daring Fireball has taken a huge credibility hit in my eyes in the last couple of weeks. It's been approaching TechCrunch-style speculation and histrionics.

Yes, he deserves points for for admitting he was wrong - it takes a big person to do that. Personally, however, I would have preferred to see the articles not written in the first place until things were a bit more clear.

Perhaps this is inevitable when your blog suddenly becomes a significant source of revenue?

Suddenly? DF has been around for years, and it's been Gruber's only source of income since 2006. The irony of bitching about histrionics...

Dude, he's a single guy writing a blog, and it's still a personal blog by most standards. That is, most of his posts are just him linking to things he thinks is cool, whether or not it's Mac-related. When he blogs about things sources have told him, it's still one guy saying "Hey, my friend told me this." He's very frequently right, but he's not an Apple employee and he has to rely on people.

Approaching TechCrunch-style speculation? Seriously? He wrote two small blurbs about this Apple/AT&T thing, and beyond that left it completely alone, except to admit when he was wrong. Meanwhile, the rest of his articles/links have been as good as they were since I started reading him two years ago.

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