Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

I'm as excited as the next guy about the iPhone--Apple's new super-cell that is coming out in June--but CNET News just reported how the iPhone led some new media journalists down a rabbit hole last week.

In the article, CNET News crowed about their competition's mistake. The website Engadget had published a false memo about the iPhone production schedule.

Reportedly, the stock price at Apple actually dropped with the fake leak--leading CNET to dub the case "Applegate."

Every time this kind of high-speed publishing scandal rocks the blogosphere, I like to offer a quote from the story, "Penny-A-Worder" by Cornell Woolrich--a reflection on the self-destructive joy of writing for the vicious pulp fiction industry in the 1930's.

"The story flowed like a torrent.  The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet.  The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower.  The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thing gray ghosts, in good cause; the mortality rate was terrible."

Right now, the only successful writers are the ones who produce manic quantities of opinionated posts on the web. I'm scared that ten years from now, thousands of frenzied writers will be publishing millions of disposable blog posts, all of us earning Depression-era salaries.

The lesson is simple for us reporters writing at the speed of blog: don't let this new news cycle spoil your instincts.