Un bel pezzo sul New York Times su quanto paghi dirle grosse in rete.

AT 2:56 in the morning on May 5, a headline flashed on Gawker, the New York gossip site that also carries a smattering of Silicon Valley buzz. It was tentative in its phrasing: “Could Apple Buy Twitter?”

But the post boldly claimed that “a source who’s plugged into the Valley’s deal scene and has been recruited by Apple for a senior position” was saying negotiations were well under way.

Hours later, TechCrunch, a popular Silicon Valley tech news site, was reporting the very same thing. The posts generated a good deal of traffic for both sites. They were picked up by numerous reputable sitesand retweeted endlessly on Twitter. The TechCrunch post yielded 405 comments from readers, an unusually large response. Within 12 hours the Gawker post had been viewed 22,000 times, enough to earn it the orange flame that Gawker editors use to designate a post as hot news.

Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post. (Owen Thomas, the writer of the Gawker post, has since taken a job at NBC and did not want to comment on the record.)

Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade. In October, for instance, Silicon Alley Insider discussed a rumorthat first appeared in a “citizen journalism” section of the CNN Web site that Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, had had a heart attack. He hadn’t.