Life as an online journalist

There’s not much to say about the decision itself – if the websites indeed divulged trade secrets, they were inherently a party to a crime and hence not protected. They were doomed to begin with. The fundamental issue is then the definition of a trade secret. There were several factors that go into this: is the information widely known outside the corporation? How much information was known by the corporation’s employees? What measures were taken to guard the secrecy? What is the value of the information to the competition? How much money was involved in developing the information? The websites clearly faced an uphill battle here because what was published was not merely a vague description of an upcoming product, but a copy of a detailed drawing of Apple’s products taken from a slide labeled with Apple Need-to-Know Confidential.

The Big Picture

The relationship between journalists and corporations has always been a Cold War. It’s the threat of mutually assured destruction that keeps everyone working together. On the one hand, corporations would love to be able to control everything that is published. They could ensure that only positive reviews and news were released. In their perfect world, if you published a negative review they could sue your for libel! In fact, this happened in 1984 when the Bose Corporation sued Consumer Reports for libel and actual malice. The complaint was that the reviewer wrote that Bose loudspeakers caused sounds of individual music instruments to “wander about the room” when Bose insisted that they merely wandered “along the walls.” By claiming that the sounds wandered about the room, Bose claimed that Consumer Reports was perpetuating a lie that would hurt their brand-identity. The scary part is that Bose won their case. It was only after the Court of Appeals reviewed the case was the decision reversed.

At the same, in order to survive, journalists are dependent on manufacturers. Publications need readers and this means writing the best stories and being first out with the story. When a company launches a new product, FiringSquad is there with a launch-day report. We’re able to do this because both companies provide information to our team prior to the public announcement, giving us time to prepare our work. We wouldn’t get nearly the same circulation if we only published our overviews a month later. Even then, most journalists feel like they have a higher calling to bring The Truth to readers with unbiased analysis, after all, we’ve got big egos.

So there’s always an underlying antagonism between the two sides – you will rarely find a marketing manager who doesn’t claim that his product is the greatest thing on this planet or a journalist who won’t jump at the chance to break the story on something big, or call foul on a company cheating on benchmarks. It’s almost like the movie, The Sum of All Fears, where the Russian and US intelligence agents share information when it is appropriate but are still looking for ways to out do the other.

It’s clear to see how reviewers have control over companies. They are the ones who directly address the reader and they are the ones who put words down onto paper and describe and judge products. However companies can control the review websites by controlling who reviews products. Although you would hope it to be true, review websites simply don’t have the financial resources to purchase every product needed to review – banner ads simply don’t generate enough click-throughs and revenue – when was the last time you read a FiringSquad article? How much did you pay for it? Compare that to the last time you clicked on a banner ad at FiringSquad? Do you even let ads show through? Don’t feel bad – no one ever clicks on the ads. The way magazines can work around the manufacturers and to deal directly with retailers – the arms dealers of this cold war.

However, it isn’t even about being cheap and getting “free” hardware, but it’s about getting products on time, and in this profession, “on time” means before retail release. After all, if you’ve already read half-dozen reviews of a particular video card, you’re not likely to be interested in reading a 7th a few weeks later...