TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington has been working on his "CrunchPad" for more than a year now. TechCrunch posted a mockup of the "near-final industrial design" in June and Arrington predicted a July ship date, now three months come and gone. To become Product of the Year, shouldn't CrunchPad at least exist in the form of a demo unit that circulates to a reasonable number of journalists? Or be actually, err, shipping?

Not that the product isn't under development, or won't come out. If anything, Arrington, who has posted sporadic prototype photos to TechCrunch, deserves kudos for whipping up such absurdly enthusiastic press interest. He's helped along by one simple truth: Journalists have always loved the idea that one of their own can strike it rich. With the industry in its present shape, who can blame them for clinging to that hope especially tightly?

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

An attention seeker at an attention-seeking company said something outrageous about the iPhone, and of course the news is now everywhere. Here is the specific outrageous thing, spoken by the CEO of GetJar (you don't care what that is, trust us) to the BBC:

"Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet... They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. "

Every bubble needs nonsense on which to feed. Ten years ago, during the dot-com bubble, we learned the following:

• The Dow would hit 50,000 (it's now just below 9,000).
  
• Amazon stock would hit 400 (it peaked around 115 and peaked above 300 but quickly fell back to Earth and now trades for about 80)
  
• The online ad business would be worth $28 billion by 2005 (try less than half that)

Since iPhone apps are internet apps, sold via the internet, for use on the internet, the idea they will be "bigger than the internet" somehow — in related software revenue? lines of code? time spent by users? — is nonsensical. And thus perfect for parting fools with their money! We can't wait for the first iPhone app investment fund. (Oh, nevermind, too late.)

(Pic: Steve Jobs with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile executives for the unveiling of the iPhone in Germany, September 2007.)

Among the "exclusives" the company has been bragging about internally came June 1, when London critic Richard Vines scooped the Associated Press and Reuters by a full minute on the result of the televised Britain's Got Talent competition: Internet sensation Susan Boyle lost to dance troupe Diversity. You can find the bragging and the "story" reprinted below.

It turns out, our tipster reports, that only about 500 people read this story, and no wonder: Anyone in need of the freshest Got Talent information needed only turn on their TV; there would have been no point in waiting for Bloomberg to route the results through its terminals. Our tipster:

One way of expressing this is that 12m people knew this apparently crucial result immediately by dint of live free-to-air TV, while 500 poor souls who pay $2000 a month for the system were totally in the dark for at least five minutes.

That's eminently logical, to be sure, but at Bloomberg it's the exception that proves the rule: The company remains as obsessed with metrics as its founder Michael Bloomberg, and, within the firm's command-and-control culture, numbers tend to trump reason.

BN FIRST: Susan Boyle Loses in Final of U.K. Talent Show
2009-06-01 18:56:25.35 GMT

((Richard Vines was the first to report on the result
of a U.K. talent show contest. AP and Reuters followed a
minute later. Editors: Sylvia Wier, Christopher Wellisz.
Team leader: Mark Beech.))
By Richard Vines
May 31 (Bloomberg) — Susan Boyle, the church worker
from Scotland whose voice and life story captured the
attention of people around the world, was defeated in the
final of the U.K. television talent show that made her
famous.
To read the Bloomberg story, go to {NSN KKIKQ907SXKX }


-0- Jun/01/2009 18:56 GMT

Some inside the Googleplex believe that Crowley got the code for his new friend-finding startup Foursquare from Dodgeball, the startup he sold to Google for an estimated $40 million in 2005. And after Valleywag reported their suspicions, a source tells us Crowley has been going around telling people at South By Southwest that he did reuse the code, and that he doesn't expect Google will do anything about it.

But that's not what he told Dan Fost of the Los Angeles Times when asked about the charge. Fost credulously printed Crowley's reply:

The code is all brand new. I didn't understand that story. I'm sick as a dog and pasty because I've been holed up for two months writing this stuff.

If only Fost had thought to factcheck that with, say, any of the South By Southwest attendees to whom Crowley confessed. Or with engineers who have inspected Foursquare's code and found elements directly lifted from Dodgeball. That would be work, though — an element curiously missing from much of today's tech journalism.

(Photo by thenextweb)

Earlier, we noted Goldman's habit of dressing up a top Apple flack's spin as information coming from a "source inside Apple." He's now extended that practice to Intel, the large chipmaker.

Bloomberg recently got a scoop about Intel CEO Paul Otellini predicting a first-quarter loss in a conversation with employees circulated internally. It's the kind of story CNBC viewers are hungry for.

But instead of getting the story first, Goldman tried to knock it down. Why? An Intel "source" told him that Otellini's comments didn't come in a "memo," but instead appeared in a "transcript." It's the kind of specious semantics only a flack would engage in, and no competent reporter would buy.

Indeed, later in the piece, Goldman quotes Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. That makes it look like the extent of Goldman's reporting was this: He spoke to Mulloy and agreed to attribute some of his comments to an unnamed "source" and print other on-the-record comments verbatim, magically transforming a one-source story straight from a company flack into something that looks like it has multiple sources.

What's really bizarre: We've heard that Goldman claims to be tight with Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who is no doubt one of the "tech-industry CEO" sources he cites on air. Former CNBC employees told us Goldman once flew to Brazil with Barrett on an Intel corporate jet and bragged about going on a hunting trip with the tech mogul. So why didn't Goldman get the scoop on Intel's first quarter, if he's so tight with Barrett? There would be far fewer questions about Goldman's reporting if he simply got stories first, and got stories right.

Though Goldman never discloses it on air, one of his Apple sources is Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, who previously worked with Goldman at CNBC'S Silicon Valley bureau. Does he have other sources within Apple?

He claims to, as the New York Times notes. He went on air last month, in the clip above, to declare Jobs "fine." And in a recent blog post, Goldman dug himself deeper as he stuck to his story:

All along, sources (and yes, there are several) inside Apple have reassured me that Jobs was firmly in charge, executing his responsibilities, and performing his role as C.E.O. One source, who I have known for years, told me recently that Jobs was 'fine,' and that everything was under control. All of it was fine. And I stand by every word of that reporting. Even today.

"Several" sources: Does that mean Goldman spoke to Dowling, his former colleague, and Katie Cotton, Jobs's personal PR guru at Apple, who has a track record of lying about her boss?

Take this earlier blog post from Goldman, when worries first emerged that Jobs, who had undergone surgery to treat pancreatic cancer in 2004, was skipping the annual Macworld Expo event where he usually delivers a keynote address, because his health was failing:

I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs' decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should 'rest assured that the board would let me know.'

Sounds like Goldman has a direct line to the Apple board, right? Wrong. That's the same statement Dowling gave every other media outlet:

If Steve or the board decides that Steve is no longer capable of doing his job as CEO of Apple, I am sure they will let you know.

The only conclusion to reach here: Either Goldman is puffing up flacks as sources, or his sources don't exist.

That's what one former colleague of Goldman's thinks:

Here’s the key to revealing Goldman — he doesn’t have any sources. And his bosses back in New Jersey don’t know that. His only Apple "source" is a flack, Steve Dowling, who once worked at CNBC as the Silicon Valley (off-air) bureau chief.

The question you should raise — does CNBC's managing editor know who Goldman’s sources are? He inflates his bogus persona as a Silicon Valley insider by inventing sources. At any legitimate news organization, if you can use an unnamed "source" your boss must know who it is, by name.

Does CNBC follow this practice? (The answer, as I know well, is: no).

I’ve watched Goldman sit at his desk without picking up the phone for hours, then go on the air and say “I just got off the phone with a source inside Google who tells me...”

He flat out makes it up. He IS Jayson Blair. And he's the only person at CNBC who even tries to get away with it.

Fast Company's Adam Penenberg tried Googling "CNBC ethics" and came up short. We called Kevin Goldman, a spokesman for CNBC, to ask what the network's policies on anonymous sources were — how they were to be used, and whether reporters were obligated to reveal their identities to their editors and producers. (Such is the practice at most magazines and newspapers.)

Goldman (no relation to Jim) said, "CNBC has policies and guidelines that are followed by everyone. And we don't disclose those policies to the public." And he would not comment on the identity of CNBC's sources at Apple.

Blogs are not known for impeccable sourcing. (We call them "tipsters" for a reason.) But at least we're upfront about it — indeed, we're the first to question our sources, often in the same blog post that we cite them. That kind of probing uncertainty makes for a better path to the truth. But it doesn't make good television, and it doesn't fluff up the easily deflated ego of a self-declared "insider."

Luckily, we know some impolite ones.

Here's Goldman, Wednesday night, getting chopped off at the knees by Newsweek columnist (and former Steve Jobs impersonator) Dan Lyons.

Lyons: "You ever have a girlfriend who cheated on you, and at first it's like, 'I work late'?"

Goldman: "I reported exactly what I was told."

Lyons: "There are two kinds of reporters who cover Apple: The kind who realize they're getting snowed ... and the other kind who suck up to get access and end up getting played and punked, like your bureau chief."

Goldman: "I'm a big boy. I can handle it."

Had CNBC's viewers seen a full-body shot of Goldman like the one above, they would have cracked up just like Lyons did. And he isn't alone. Goldman has a terrible reputation among the Valley's elite which leads some to fixate on his height. "I hate that shrimp," one local tastemaker recently seethed at us.

Such is the dislike for Goldman that a tipster gleefully sent us the snap of Goldman getting a boost during a stand-up shoot at Macworld Expo earlier this month. (He stood on a piece of equipment to make his Lilliputian dimensions look more normal on-air.) It's a subterfuge that might have gone unremarked, if so many people weren't already scoffing at Goldman's credibility.

It is facile pop psychology, sure, but it's hard not to look at Goldman's combativeness — most recently on display in his aggressively incorrect denials of Apple CEO Steve Jobs's ill health — and not see a Napoleon complex, which he exercises at the expense of his reporting. (And his career: CNBC already has a short, angry man in Jim Cramer.)

Ridiculing a man behind his back for his height? So low. Valleywag would never stoop to that level. We'd say it to his face. Even if it hurts our neck a little.

Update: A big man, indeed: CNBC has banned Lyons from the network for life, according to Silicon Alley Insider. Or not, according to Silicon Alley Insider!

His source: A tech CEO with "no axe to grind" who is "in Jobs's inner circle" and worries that Jobs is in a "state of denial" about his declining health. Anyone familiar with Jobs knows that sure sounds like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison; Jobs is not close to many of his peers in the industry. Bill Campbell, the former CEO of Intuit, is the other likely candidate.

If he indeed spoke to the likes of Ellison or Campbell, Goldman learned what Valleywag readers knew a month ago: That a close friend, Ellison, is distraught over Jobs's health and believes that he is dying. (And, as Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson points out, if Goldman really knew this a week ago, why didn't he report it then?)

Instead of doing that reporting when he should have — last month — Goldman was content to recite Apple's press statements on air and reassure viewers that Jobs was healthy. (Cozily, Apple's top corporate flack, Steve Dowling, was previously CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief.)

Goldman is merely the worst of the mainstream pack of reporters who have chased their tails on the story of Jobs's secretly declining health, as blogs like Valleywag and Gizmodo have pushed the questions they are too polite (or lazy) to ask. Aside from some keen reporting by New York Times writers John Markoff and Joe Nocera last year, no one has gotten close to the truth: Jobs's gaunt appearance at an event last summer was merely the most obvious marker of the deeper health problems Apple CEO has suffered from since he was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Jobs has now, in a belatedly noble move, stepped down from his job, having accepted that he can no longer do it. Some reporters might consider copying him.

CNBC's change of tune is a classic cautionary tale. Reporters trade favorable coverage for access to products and executives all the time. But Jim Goldman, the network's tech reporter, has turned access journalism into a cringe-inducing parody of itself.

When the iPhone launched in the summer of 2007, CNBC didn't get a review unit. NBC's Today show did, but a staged call between hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer famously failed. Later that day, a CNBC reporter went on air for an On The Money segment and launched into a tirade about Apple's botched PR, its unshowered fanboys, and its trouble with the SEC over stock options. (That reporter was not Goldman, as we incorrectly reported in an earlier version of this post; Goldman tells us he was "livid" with the segment.) The rant was acidic, funny, over the top — and, for a cable-news network, shockingly accurate.

After that, CNBC insiders say, Apple's PR operatives called up executives at the network and threatened to cut off access for good. The show's producer was called onto the carpet, and soon afterwards left the network; to this day, many employees still believe he was fired under pressure from Apple. (He actually wasn't, but he told an acquaintance that the Apple incident left a bad taste in his mouth and hurried his exit.)

Goldman, on the other hand, has been carefully toeing the Apple line, and was rewarded last summer with a face-to-face interview with Jobs. The Apple CEO's scarily gaunt appearance was on everyone's mind, including Goldman's. But the subject never came up. Goldman later wrote that he was privately horrified by Jobs's "sickly" state but thought better of probing into it.

Which brings us to the latest Jobs health scare, which turned out to be well-based in fact. Goldman sputtered on air as he had to explain the denials he was spoonfed by Apple PR — and acted outraged when a coworker made a joke about Jobs's hormonal imbalance — the root of his weight loss — being like PMS.

And who wielded the spoon? Steve Dowling, Apple's top corporate flack under Katie Cotton, was Goldman's predecessor as CNBC's chief Silicon Valley correspondent. We hear he left the network on bad terms. If so, that surely made the revenge of turning his replacement into Apple's pet all the sweeter. Do you think that if Goldman's really nice, Dowling will hire him, too?

The Los Angeles Times carried a report about lost perks in Santa Monica, the home of the Yahoo Media Group: no more reserved parking for executives; no more fruit, bagels, and muffins; no more coffee cards (just brew-your-own Starbucks). But the best part wasn't the new cutbacks; it was the old dish on Braun's supposed excesses.

Never mind that most of the juicy gossip still told about Braun — an umbrella stolen from the employee store! a request for a corporate jet, turned down! a lavish office with its own patio — may not be true.

Braun, who joined Yahoo in 2004 with the express mission of bringing some Hollywood flair to its media operations, came to represent everything wrong about the company under ex-CEO Terry Semel. But the early parts of his career there were spent just organizing Yahoo's media properties, like Yahoo News, Finance, and Sports, into a single group. Along the way, he rapidly ran against resistance from the Silicon Valley's engineer-centric culture. When Valleywag launched in early 2006, Braun's departure seemed imminent; it ended up taking most of the year.

The infighting became legendary — like the time Yahoo's homepage producers, who then reported to rival executive Jeff Weiner, didn't bother to link to expansive Oscar coverage produced by Braun's group. Even Braun's facial tics became fodder for speculation.

So what was Braunism, this ideology that requires such ritual denouncements? Chiefly, it was the notion that Yahoo should become some kind of newfangled movie studio, producing original videos to distribute to its hundreds of millions of users. (One of Braun's ideas, really: a newscast with puppets. It was not greenlighted.) The production efforts proved expensive, and nothing Braun launched attracted a lasting audience. Meanwhile, Google was making a mint by merely indexing other people's content and hosting blogs and videos created by users.

But the strategy was Semel's as much as it was Braun's. So why do Yahoos pick on Braun? As a TV producer, he ended up as a recurring joke in Seinfeld, a show he oversaw. And his colorful malapropisms make him easy to caricature. He makes a good story. Which is why, even now, he comes up in stories about Yahoo mending its ways.

Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog he launched in 2006. Writing from home at night, Dan vented his frustrations as a Forbes writer by inventing a fictional Steve Jobs character. Fake Steve said everything about the tech industry's titans that Dan wasn't allowed to print in Forbes. (Check out "I love to fuck with car salesmen" and "Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.")

Today, it seems Dan has taken down a post, for the first time any of us can remember. From most reporters, I'd consider this typical pointy-haired management, what can ya do, etc. But seeing Dan Lyons self-censor his own honest work makes me wonder if I'll be able to stay true to my own after I leave Valleywag's free-fire zone next month.

What's changed for Lyons? Simple: This past summer, Newsweek hired him away from Forbes. After a long series of talks with both old and new editors, Lyons shut down Fake Steve Jobs and started a new blog, Real Dan Lyons.

Yesterday he blogged a potty-mouthed, Fake-Steve-style rant about Yahoo's PR people yanking his chain in his official Newsweek reporter role. Today that post is gone. Dan's not answering his cellphone or email today, so I have to presume it was his Newsweek editor who made him take it down. Certainly, I've never seen Lyons wake up in the morning and rush to undo his previous night's typing.

Here's the timeline:

• A month ago, Yahoo's PR reps put Dan on the phone, as a Newsweek reporter, with Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman.
• Bostock swore up and down, over and over again, that Jerry Yang was not being challenged as CEO of the flailing, sprawling company he co-founded more than ten years ago. A side note: A lawyer Yahoo PR put in touch with Lyons also swore that a lucrative deal to have Google sell ads for Yahoo was going to make it past antitrust regulators, no problem.
• Yesterday: Whoops. The Google deal never happened, and Yang has been forced out of the CEO seat.
• On Monday, Lyons posted to his own blog, blasting Yahoo's PR people as "lying sacks of shit."
• Today, that post is replaced with a 404 error. I dialed Dan's cellphone and got a robotic message saying this customer is not accepting calls.
• We can't think of a single Fake Steve Jobs post that Dan redacted while at Forbes. Can you?

I’d never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they’re really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo’s attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true “inside story” of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they’re fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah. Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.

And in case Newsweek's handwringingly sanctimonious editors make Lyons pull the blog post in the morning, here's a screenshot:

For good measure, Lyons also slapped Kara Swisher, the thoroughly self-involved AllThingsD editor who broke the story about Yang's departure.

Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy, who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader, which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last. Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?

(Photo by Jeff Jarvis)

Woj's new disclaimer reads:

I am a long time high school journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA, but I also have children who are either employed by or otherwise have a financial interest in Google. I am not employed by Google and own no Google stock.

The disclaimer is true in a Clintonian sense. However, Woj does not say she has previously been employed by Google as an "educational consultant" from 2005 to 2006, creating several programs which promoted Google to teachers. Her otherwise lengthy Huffington Post bio does not disclose this fact.

That's not the end of her conflicts of interest. Woj joined the board of Creative Commons, a nonprofit group which promotes alternative means of licensing copyrighted works, in July. Earlier this year, Wojcicki promoted a Creative Commons project without disclosing any ties to the group — such as whether she was, at the time, in discussions to take a seat on its board. At the least, the appointment has the appearance of a reward for her positive coverage.

Which makes me think that disclosure is simply not part of the journalistic curriculum at Paly. Susan Wojcicki rented out her garage as Google's first office; the Wojcicki family has been entwined with Google practically from its inception.

Woj's Google obsession in the Huffington Post would be less disturbing, perhaps, if she stuck to promoting Google's nonprofit efforts. But some plug for Google's products seems to sneak into her writing, too. Whether or not she's got a current, personal financial conflict of interest, she's clearly got an emotional one. Would Bill Gates's mother-in-law bash Microsoft products?

So perhaps Woj is incapable of seeing a tie to Google as something worth disclaiming. Perhaps she has so internalized its don't-be-evil worldview that identifying oneself as connected to Google feels like bragging that she's a good person. Doesn't every good person support Google, the company of good, and all the good it does in the world?

If that's really what Woj believes, she should exercise the critical thinking she ought to be teaching her in the classroom and recognize that her bias runs so deep that she can't even write a truthful disclaimer. And if so, she should stop writing about Google, Creative Commons, her daughter Anne's genomics startup 23andMe, and the various other investments her extended family is entwined in. I can think of no better example Woj can set for her students.

And if she can't, or won't? Perhaps its time for Paly's administration to stop letting her teach her journalism students the wrong lesson.

Are you profitable?
Byrne: Yes, that's real GAAP profit, not Amazon-bullshit-accounting profit.

In fact, it was neither. Overstock.com was then a private company, but it later revealed, when it filed for an IPO, that it had lost $13.8 million in 2001. With the latest financial restatements, it's been revealed that the company has never made an annual profit since its inception. And yet Byrne would rather blame a conspiracy of rogue traders for his company's woes.