TechCrunch’s Dilemma: To Publish Or Not?

A little TechCrunch/Twitter drama is playing out this week in the blogtwitterverse.

Apparently, about a month ago, a Twitter employee’s email account was hacked, and sensitive business information about Twitter - including business plans, meeting notes, salary data, financial projections, and partner agreements - was obtained by the hacker. There was other, more personal information in the mix - salary data, names of people who had interviewed at Twitter, etc. All of that information was sent in a zip file via email to TechCrunch, a well-known tech blog. It now appears that TechCrunch intends to publish the hacked Twitter information, minus the personally sensitive stuff.

On Tuesday, TechCrunch first posted that it would publish the documents. That post prompted over a thousand responses, many negative, and also prompted TechCrunch to post an update, responding to the responses. TechCrunch’s position is simple: it received the information, the information isn’t personally embarrassing to any individual, the information is interesting, and it is going to share it. Even though the documents were obtained through unethical means, TechCrunch sees no ethical dilemma in making it public. The documents will eventually get out, it reasons, so why not be the one to publish it?

This sentence seems to sum up TechCrunch’s position the best:“[I]t certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news.”

Late yesterday afternoon, TechCrunch posted Twitter’s financial forecast through 2013 - clearly interesting reading for anyone who has been watching the microblogging site’s meteoric rise and wondering how it plans to make money. In the post, TechCrunch suggested that it plans to post more of the Twitter documents, and also noted that it has been in negotiations with Twitter’s lawyers over the issue of the hacked documents. (FYI - here’s Twitter’s response, posted yesterday, to TechCrunch’s first post about the documents.)

[UPDATE: This afternoon, TechCrunch posted a significant amount of very sensitive Twitter business information - pages and pages about partnerships, threats, goals, projections, celebrities, and much more.]

I get that blogs aren’t newspapers, and that they are therefore not necessarily held to the same ethical standards as traditional print journalists. And I don’t even know whether a newspaper would be ethically obligated not to publish hacked material. In my mind, the answer to that question doesn’t ultimately matter: the point is that scoops and traffic numbers should not be the most important things to consider when facing a dilemma like this. Sometimes, you do the right thing, just because it’s the right thing to do. And TechCrunch should have taken a pass on the documents. Would it have cost them anything to do so, other than some lost page views? Meanwhile, the potential damage to Twitter is huge.

TechCrunch likes to play on the edges - I realize that. (See its statement last year that it would no longer honor embargoes.) But it is worth it? I’d have to say no.

Posted by Gayle Weiswasser on July 16, 2009 at 11:44 AM
in Faith and Values, Intellectual Property, Internet

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COMMENTS (4)

Gayle - here’s the relevant bit of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics code:

Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story.

Hacking is definitely “undercover” and “surreptitious”. The question is whether the Twitter documents released by TC could be described as “vital to the public”. And I don’t see any way they could be characterized as vital. Even among the tech crowd, the financial forecasts were kind of a mild curiosity; nothing earth-shattering. And outside the relatively small bubble of tech enthusiasts, the news is even less consequential. And you’re right - the post gave a small boost to TC, but now Twitter has to revamp a big chunk of their business strategy.

Maybe the bigger question is whether “journalism”, as such, can survive with any sort of ethics code at all. The way I see it, ethics and laws are the product of relative abundance - you can afford to be prudent if you’re making money. But in a hyper-competitive news environment with so many players, can anyone really say no to even the mildest of scoops, even if its achieved through unsavory means? I’d be interested to see what our firm’s former journalists think.

Posted by: Corey | July 16, 2009 at 12:34 PM

I agree with the general sentiment of this post. While the information is not blatantly harmful and does provide interesting reading, that information does have the right to be published. I would think the executives of TechCrunch would feel the same way should their private files be stolen and published. This very much is a question of ethics and professional practice.

While I am not suggesting that TechCrunch had anything to do with the theft of the material, it does open a frightening door. What would stop a publication for endorsing the theft of corporate information for the sake of publishing that information? There is a line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. In my personal opinion, even if that line was not crossed here, this is a little too close for comfort.

Posted by: Jason | July 16, 2009 at 12:44 PM

Gayle, This is my first visit to your blog, so please pardon me making this immediate comment.

I agree with your views except with regards to your point that blog-centered media networks do not fall under the same practices and ethics as traditional news organizations.

Print, radio, online — it’s just a matter of channel. Blog-based media networks are as accountable as any other publisher.

Posted by: Barbara French | July 16, 2009 at 1:03 PM

While I really like TC for what they do well, I agree that if you’re going to live by the sword and say you do “real” reporting, then die by that same sword and be held to standards of ethical journalism.

Jason makes an important point: what is the difference between a TMZ, where photographers are paid to push the bounds of decency/legality to get an incriminating shot of a celebrity, and a TC — if TC is willing to publish incriminating or embarrassing information that was obtained outside the bounds of legality?

There may be a difference. But it gets pretty slight. It’s not like there was some massive fraud being perpetrated on the public that needed to be exposed. This was just private company information. I understand that “news is news,” and someone would undoubtedly publish the documents. But it would have earned TC a lot of points if they’d said — hey, we got these documents and we’re giving them back. It might have chilled the initiative to steal; and it might have won TC a lot of credibility. It’s all speculation. But now we’ll never know.

Posted by: Merredith | July 16, 2009 at 1:37 PM

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