How the NYT's Dealbook missed a golden opportunity

Felix Salmon of Reuters writes Tuesday about how the New York Times’ Dealbook blog missed a story about Hewlett-Packard’s criticism of one of its business columnists, Joe Nocera, allowing its competition to beat them to the punch.

Salmon writes, “A nice little scoop fell into Dealbook’s lap yesterday, when Ray Lane, the incoming chairman of Hewlett-Packard, wrote a strongly-worded letter to the NYT in response to Joe Nocera’s column on Saturday. In it, Lane linked to a blog entry by Josh Greenbaum which also took issue with Nocera’s column.

“Dealbook, however, didn’t publish the letter, which was clearly intended for publication; nor did it link to the letter elsewhere; nor did it link to Greenbaum’s post. Instead, in an unsigned post, it merely quoted two paragraphs from the letter.

“And so it was left to Dealbook’s biggest rival, the WSJ — in the form of its All Things Digital franchise — to publish the letter. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher obtained a copy of the email, posted it, and ended up outscooping the very publication to whom the letter was addressed.

“All of which says to me that Dealbook still has a newspaper mindset, rather than a blog mindset; I guess the editors there felt that their job was to report on the letter, rather than simply publish it. (The FT clearly felt the same way: it reported on the letter, but neither published it nor linked to it.) It’s a bad habit left over from print days, and it shouldn’t happen on any newspaper website, let alone a blog.”

Read more here.