This is what's profoundly wrong with this Arrington character. What an awful, tabloid approach to defining news. New reporting is, quite simply, doing the legwork to bring stories to your attention.
They might not have come to your attention for any number of reasons - distance from the source (too many nodes between you and it for it to get carried to your ears by your social network), original source too small/obscure, information not meme/viral enough (too complex? takeaways not clear? relevance to you is difference to relevance of all the potential, necessary carrier nodes it would take to reach you), you need your information filtered because you're too plugged in; privacy / legal status of the source is just one reason why you might not get information.
Whether a news outlet should carry that last set of info to your ears or not is up for debate; but to see his role as binary - advertising/PR newswire vs. broadcaster of leaked private information... well, how sad.
He's not alone of course. Tabloids have been operating on basically just that model for eons. With the occasional fabrication when they can't get enough leaks to fill the inches.
You sir are right. I should of course trust the officials and you as to wether or not I should know something. Those people didn't get to be official without obviously having the utmost concern for my well-being, and without wanting me to be fully informed of the important stuff. Who do I think I am, wanting to know something that someone else deems improper for me to know?
Don't forget genuine analysis, especially in the sense of placing things in context, historically speaking.
That's something that's hugely missing from the "tech reporting" (ha) of today. Almost no one considers the things that came before.
For example, I saw no one else comparing Google Wave to OpenDoc... or even remarking on the old command-line tool, talk/ytalk. Both of which are extremely relevant to Wave as a product.
Is a newspaper full of what's new, or is it news because it's in the paper?
Most of the front-page articles on HN are not news, they are recycled anti-business school puff pieces. And yet, this is Hacker News.
If Google releases a product that looks suspiciously like Apple's failed OpenDoc initiative from, oh, 12 years ago, that's news. If they're focusing on a communication medium style that totally existed before, but which was largely abandoned because it was incredibly annoying, that's news, too. Those who don't learn, doomed repeat, etc., etc.
Whether a news outlet should carry that last set of info to your ears or not is up for debate; but to see his role as binary - advertising/PR newswire vs. broadcaster of leaked private information... well, how sad.
He's not alone of course. Tabloids have been operating on basically just that model for eons. With the occasional fabrication when they can't get enough leaks to fill the inches.