Yep, I was taken in as well. The night before the iPad launch Jason Calacanis started off a stream of tweets that said that he had been an iPad tester for a while and rattled off a features that sounded logical. Cameras, games, e-reader, solar panels … hold on … I was wondering about that.
I was pretty interested what Jason was saying and since I met him a few times, I figured that there wasn’t a bad chance that Apple had given him an iPad to test. The next morning I was going to be on the radio with Buzz Bishop on his new morning show in Calgary. Darn good thing I got up early to read my feeds before hand so I caught Techcrunch calling BS on the whole thing.
Others weren’t so lucky:
If you’ve wanted proof that we in the professional press are as crazy as a pack of Mac fanboys when it comes to reporting on Apple, here it is. Late Tuesday, the night before Steve Jobs walked on stage to unwrap the iPad, baby-faced entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who made bank in the 90s as editor of Silicon Alley Reporter and again in the 2000’s with Engadget, began goofily tweeting that he was a beta tester for Apple’s about-to-launch tablet.
[snip]
Valleywag editor Ryan Tate made a “collage of shame” below with screenshots from the sites that should have known better: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, CNN Money, Reuters, Macworld, and Joystiq. Yes, Joystiq!
link: Calacanis’ tablet tweets accidentally hoax mainstream media | VentureBeat
Lesson here?
Yeah, the grain of salt thing is pretty much bang on here. This isn’t a “shame on Jason for fooling us…” post this is a “shame on us for wanting to believe more than double checking facts” post. Yeah I was taken in too. I wondered if they were true. I wondered why Jason would bite the hand of Apple for letting him have early access to the iPad and blabbing about it (we know that never ends well).
My only saving grace was that I didn’t post about it.
Well I guess this is one time when media (mainstream and new) can be equally red-faced over this. Lesson learned. I think terms like “allegedly”, “rumored”, and “possible” are ones we need to make sure we use a lot.
Now back to your regularly scheduled Internet rumor…
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress.
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