On my way back from Montreal, I was listening to some Fresh Air podcasts. This one on April 20th 2010: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126108594 is an interview with a New York Times reporter deployed to Afghanistan. He's talking at a point about handling a sensitive piece of information that he got his hands on. It's about a bigwig taliban being identified in a group of random taliban arrested in Karachi. The event ended with the reported muzzling the story at the request of the government, at least temporarily. When the reporter got his hands on the news, he went back and forth trying to get more data, and even after he got all his facts the paper didn't just run the article, they waited and assessed the situation.

Contrast this to the Gizmodo case where they jumped ahead with the new iPhone 4 article (http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone), and in the end they are facing a messy situation, with police investigations and such.

For the life of me I don't understand why they didn't talk to Apple first when they got their hands on the device. There was probably a lot of goodwill they could have bought from Apple if they just sent the phone back. They could have negotiated an agreement about a controlled release of a review. Anything but what they just did. Was it worth to break their relationship with Apple over a prototype? Will they ever gonna be invited back to any Apple event? Probably not.

Comparing the 2 approaches to handling secret information/news, Gizmodo appears to be very unprofessional.