[tmsh]

i e-mailed this. including it below in case anyone finds it curious.

'of course fake steve jobs is all caught up in the fact that he wrote a semi decent article for newsweek about this. but the failure at nyt is pretty epic. i remember reading their article on zynga last week and thinking -- wtf? are these guys even paying attention to anything? but investigative journalism is quite different from other types of journalism. but i will say about arrington that the two big points in his favor were (a) in his original riposte with shukla, he says in his second mic session, 'this will make good copy'. the fact that he knew that way back then is a sign that that fool has matured. he is way ahead of the game compared to any other tech journalist. (b) the video he found of pincus telling developers that he had scammed in the beginning was HUGE. forced facebook to force zynga to kill this entire lead-gen industry (or at least severely modify it). and that, truly, is the benefit of online journalism. a single journalist at a desk assigned to a single story can't find those videos. you need the power of hundreds of people reading articles and collaborating (some dude probably thought to himself -- hmm, wait a second, i remember i was at that startup talk a couple of years ago...).

on the other hand, the developers, whom fake steve jobs calls scammy or something -- i don't really think they quite realized the extent of what was going on. it doesn't shirk their responsibility to see better. but, now we know. and boy, mainstream media was completely out of the loop of this entire change in the tech industry. so let's blame them. jk, but the long-term and short-term benefits of reporting w/ and w/o serious editors is going to be a bigger and bigger issue.'