Update: Techcrunch/RIAA/last.fm User Data Debacle

So today Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch posted an update to his last.fm story from Friday.  36 hours or so after posting the original, with more than 300 comments posted on the blog and a number of categorical denials from last.fm staffers.  Still no official statement from CBS/last.fm though.

Erick tries to clarify a couple of points.  On the timing he says he said he posted the story late on friday because he had been waiting for a statement from CBS/last.fm (when it arrived it was a one liner saying they weren’t aware of any data being handed over).  Later, he says this:

From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true.

This is from Erick’s original story: “And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. ”

That doesn’t read like a rumor to me, although Erick does refer to it as such a couple of times elsewhere in the story.  Regardless, is that what Techcrunch has become?  A Rumor mill? 

As I said in my previous post, I don’t know whether this story is true or not, but I do know that Techcrunch published the story late in the day on Friday, failed to cite sources or corroborate, and failed to give the accused party a voice or right to reply.  How many accounts have been cancelled in the 36 hours since that story ran?

Failing to identify who at last.fm/CBS gave that one line statement and rushing to publish the story without all the facts amounts to little more than tabloid rumor-mongering.  Which org (parent or child) was it that gave the original one line statement btw?  I could have sworn that in the first version of the story I read it said CBS, but now it says last.fm.

I would have expected/hoped for more from Techcrunch.  I’m also very surprised that 48 hours in there’s still no official statement from CBS or last.fm: I would have expected a statement first thing saturday morning.

Update:  Erick posted another update, here.  No more info as to sources (that I’ve been able to find), and last.fm posted a pretty angry denial on their blog.  This one looks to be fizzling out somewhat.  Wonder what impact it’s had on their numbers?  Also curious about last.fm’s statement that they’d stopped processing the cancel job so folks who deleted as  a kneejerk reaction could change their minds.  Could see how that would make folks somewhat paranoid.  Incidentally, Erick’s post now has almost 600 comments, the most that I can remember seeing on techcrunch.  Wonder what their traffic numbers for that post are like?

Plane Crash-lands Into Hudson – Twitter First, Again

This afternoon a plane crashed into the Hudson.  In itself a pretty extraordinary event.  What was especially extraordinary to me was that the story broke on Twitter.  No grey area, no arguments:  the first reports of this event were on Twitter. I was at home when it happened, with CNN on in the background.  Folks tweeted about it a good 10 minutes before it appeared on CNN, and a good 20 minutes before it appeared on online news channels.  Somebody posted a picture of the plane in the water mere minutes after the crash: http://ad.vu/2hrc

Absolutely extraordinary.

I did a quick straw poll (admittedly on Twitter, so somewhat skewed), that said that 40% of folks who heard about the crash heard about it on Twitter.  Think about that for a second, that’s absolutely nuts.  Before radio, before tv, before any other news source:  Twitter broke the news.  You and I, and others on Twitter…. beat the major, international news orgs to the news.

I think we’ll see more and more of this moving forward.  Normal folks like you and I breaking the news, citizen journalists.  Interesting to watch, and interesting to see how the news networks react to it.