The second-most-emailed Technology story on nytimes.com is "Co-Founder
of Skype Defends Its Value" a story published on October 10 but which
carries an October 9 dateline. Now back on October 9, the NYT didn’t have this
story, but Reuters did. Except Reuters had the exact opposite spin on what Niklas
Zennstrom said: they went with the headline "EBay
overpaid for firm: Skype co-founder".
The blogosphere had lots of fun with the Reuters story, especially the wonderful
quote from Zennstrom saying that Skype "overshot in terms of monetization"
– an instant classic of circumlocutory corporatespeak which resulted in
tweaking from the WSJ’s Dennis Berman.
But the "overshot in terms of monetization" quote is nowhere to be
seen in the NYT story; nor is it in the reporting from Red Herring’s Neal
Sandler.
It’s at times like this that I wish reporters behaved much more like bloggers.
We could have Sandler, and the NYT’s Victoria Shannon, and Reuters’s John Bowker
openly discussing exactly what Zennstrom did or didn’t say, and whether or not
he thinks eBay overpaid for his company. But because they all purport to give
us the objective last word on the story, anybody following the goings-on reasonably
closely is just going to be confused.
And people who don’t follow it closely will fall into two very different camps.
There’s the MSM-followers, who will read the NYT story and think Zennstrom is
defending Skype’s valuation, and there’s the blog-readers, who will read the
Reuters story and think Zennstrom is admitting that eBay overpaid.
For me, I just hope that the Reuters quote is for real. I mean, you really
can’t make that kind of thing up.