| by Joe Leo, Columnist | October 25, 2006 |
continued... from: previous page
Of course, that's the news business for you. Competition is what drives news outlets to earn their reputation among the public, such as, who gets the news right and who gets it out first (getting it right should come first!). While PBCentral.com is not technically a news outlet, it is a place you can turn to for Mac-oriented news, especially if it has to do with Mac laptops.
Or just anything and everything related to the Mac, and then some.
It is not uncommon for news outlets to share stories and resources with each other, but mutual/actual sharing is the keyword there. They even "learn" from each other from time to time! If you ever watch breaking news live on cable TV, you'll see for instance, CNN break with a story first, while MSNBC and Fox News will break the news "first," seconds or even minutes later.
(Does this remind of you of anything vaguely familiar? Something you've read about in the past, oh I don't know, three minutes or so?).
For the record, and to be fair to them, all three networks equally take turns in that role of being first with the breaking news while the rest pickup on it later. (In Apple's case, they're always first and everyone else picks up the pieces later... sorry, I just had to say that).
It's all quite amusing if you're in the field that I'm in. And sometimes it's obvious in those rare occasions that the only reason why the other two networks got the story is that someone in the control room saw their competitor's feed, and signaled the anchor's desk to break away to go live with the story.
My only issue here is that it kinda, well, stinks (I have to choose my words carefully because little by little, more of my students are learning about my "night" job... educator by day, caped crusader, I mean, Mac news writer by night) when others pretend like they came up with the idea first.
Kind of like Apple and Microsoft-- Mac OS X and Windows Vista; the iPod and the Zune; (or even Sony playing the same tune... click here for related story).
I haven't been teaching the subject of Journalism for the past eight years, going on nine, to not know the rules of the game. When my students write articles for me, I check and check and triple check their sources. If I can't confirm it, I send it back to them to provide me with their source.
Far be it for me to do the exact opposite of what I teach when I'm writing articles/stories/columns on this site. That's the LAST thing I would do as a journalist.
It's also ironic too, because you know what the lesson was in my computer class yesterday and the day before? Reliable research and checking your sources. Maybe the crew at the "anti-Mac" site could take some lessons from my 5th grade computer students. Or even from all my present and past Journalism students.
Even my students know to give credit when credit is due (attributing sources), and to never take credit for someone else's work (plagiarism). These are all issues that are stressed in class-- definitely, considering the subject areas involved --and my students have learned how / are trained to do things right.
Certainly, they should know better, right class?
(And for those students of mine wondering why I've used the first person "I" so much in this story when I always tell them to leave themselves out? Look at the classification of this story).
RELATED LINKS:
PBCentral.com, "Apple Officially Acknowledges MacBook's New Blue Hue" (10.24.06)
AppleDefects.com, "Apple Acknowledges 'Blueing' MacBook Profile..." (10.24.06)
AppleDefects.com (forums index), "Forum Topic: 'Apple Posts Fix...' " (10.24.06)
ORIGINAL SOURCES:
Apple.com (discussions.apple.com), "Apple Knowledge Base Article- ID: 304534" (10.9.06)
Apple.com (discussions.apple.com), "10.4.8 and colours?" (10.3.06)
AppleDefects.com, "Mac OS X 10.4.8 Update Causing 'Blue Tint'..." (9.30.06)