Ask Paul: July 6 (Premium)

This was a short week with two Mondays, but here's a pretty long "Ask Paul" to cap it off. Happy Friday, everyone!
Everyone is taking credit for Andromeda
kzrystof asks:
Windows Central's Daniel [Rubino] stated that they were the first ones unveiling that Microsoft was working on the Andromeda foldable device, back in October 2017. [The Verge's] Tom Warren and others were quick to point out that WC were not the first ones: it was actually a French website that published the news a few months earlier, in May 2017.

I am not asking you to write about Andromeda; I just wonder if you add any similar 'issues' regarding breaking news that you thought you were the first one breaking but turns out you were not? Is there anything that a journalist has to do to avoid this when publishing 'breaking news'?
This is a big issue in my sad little industry. We're all jockeying to be the go-to source of information, and we often step on each others' toes rather than work together. In some bad examples, we steal from each other, pretend to corroborate information so we can be part of the story, or don't cite original sources. It's the modern blogosphere. We are all guilty of this to some degree.

(There are worse examples. In some extreme cases, Microsoft was found to have seeded a single blogger with a certain news angle so that they can ensure it's written about in the way that they prefer. Here's a great example.)

With regards to the two individuals you mention above, I know them both and like them both very much. I like seeing them and hanging out with them on work trips, and I have no issues with either personally. In fact, one of the best things about these trips is the reunion nature of catching up with others in the industry. We always have a great time together.

Their publications are a bit more problematic for different reasons. What I'll say here is that trust is something that is built or destroyed over time. And it is a personal goal of mine to be trustworthy, to not take advantage of the base desires of Windows fans, and to leverage decades of experience when analyzing what Microsoft may be doing. I try not to steal credit from others and pretend that I have sources that corroborate a story that first appeared elsewhere. In short, I take the trust thing very seriously. I can't speak for others. But no one likes to have something they created stolen. Or repeated without giving any credit.

Anyway, these two issues, not coincidentally, came up within the context of the Andromeda story. In June, Brad published an Andromeda report, based on Microsoft documentation, noting that the device was "pocketable." This was the first time that I had personally seen Microsoft documentation using that term, and I called it out on a podcast as being confusing. Someone on Twitter was aghast at this assertion, because some other tech blog had been saying that for months.

But I wasn't aware of that as I don't read the site in question. And I had...

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