I found this particular piece of suspect journalism in New Zealand's ComputerWorld via MacBytes under the somewhat misleading heading of "Mac developers are a major victim of piracy". The author is Tom Yager, who writes for InfoWorld and (only slightly ironically) is the author of the Enterprise Mac weblog for that publication. I say ironic because the ComputerWorld piece bemoans the widespread acceptance of blogging as a legitimate source of news, when his own mac blog has a total of two articles that are essentially rehashed press releases with a heaping dose of superlatives thrown in. Hey Mr. Yager - write up a piece on why Mail.app's Exchange integration sucks, with some technical detail, then pop off.

For those impatient, disinterested (you're still reading?) or executive, I'll summarize the ComputerWorld article: Discussion of pre-release software by anyone other than legitimate news sources is bad. Sure, he pays lip service to the plight of the modern software developer in today's piracy-filled world, but what he's really saying is "stop talking bad about software".

Let's look at his arguments. I can't say with any certainty whether piracy actually improves the market for commercial software and neither can anyone else, and I have no idea whether most pirates would never buy the software they steal. More importantly, I don't care. I think we can all agree that taking something of value without paying is wrong, even if you say you would never pay for it anyway. But the revenue lost because of people using pirated software isn't the real problem anyway, according to the article - it's the fact that these nefarious hoodlums are then talking to each other and writing about their crime. On the Internet.

Mr. Yager takes umbrage to the fact that people with access (illicit, presumably, as otherwise they'd be under NDA) to the unreleased Mac software are talking about their experiences using the software and making potentially untrue statements about it. These wrong-thinking individuals are then discovered by evil, foolish publications who turn it into news, publishing detailed instructions or even linking directly back to the evildoers' own websites. (Publications like oh, say, InfoWorld, Mr. Yager's employer. Would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling web search!) Large corporate buyers read these articles and decide to run BeOS or Minix instead of MacOS. Angels weep.

The subtext is clear - stealing from software companies is bad, but stealing potential revenue from a software developer by publishing negative information (however factual) about an upcoming product is downright heinous. Reviews of pre-release software should be the domain of responsible, professional news organizations, not the general riff-raff. Suddenly, those two Mac blog posts I mentioned earlier make an eerie sort of sense - if publishing negative information about an unreleased product is bad, imagine the impact of doing so about a released product!

The name of the original column is Ahead of the Curve, but here InfoWorld seems to be playing defense. They're saying "Independent news sources are evil, wrong and untrustworthy. We only quote them to show you how evil they really are, or when we need a story and they've got something really juicy. But even if our story is just a link to a web site and a couple of 'refused to comment' quotes, we're still adding value." I call Shenanigans. Because while simply reprinting a blog post isn't real journalism (though the blog post could be!), most of the corporate mouthpiece journalism put out by the likes of IDG isn't either.