Is it news if nothing's happened? That's the question I found myself asking this morning as I ran through my RSS feeds.
Yesterday I posted about some tech industry gossip, but was careful to qualify the information as purely unsubstantiated rumor. It's not as if I actually called Bill Gates' publicist to confirm he had cancelled his Facebook account, and I didn't IM Larry and Sergei to confirm whether or not they had bought Bebo. As it turned out, the Bebo acquisition rumor was quashed by the end of the day, and tech columnists went back to speculating about who bought Plaxo.
But the biggest non-story of them all, the one that has generated more speculation than Brangelina's pregnancy, is the ongoing saga of the Yahoo! fire-sale. The only thing that has actually happened so far is Microsoft officially issued an offer, and Yahoo! officially turned it down. Since then there have been rumors that Yahoo! has been talking to Google, and more recently News Corp. about possible alternative deals. Obviously Yahoo!'s shareholders are the ones who are most interested in how this plays out, so Jerry Yang has sent them a letter explaining why they turned down Microsoft's offer. But how much of this news is actually worth paying attention to, since no transaction has actually occurred?
Which brings me back to my original question: is it really news if nothing has actually happened, or is it just gossip? To get to the root of the question, I just had to ask myself who actually benefits from this endless back-and-forth speculation. The answer, is pretty obvious: the publishers who are generating ad revenue from all those page views! Every entertainment publisher knows that nothing generates a good buzz like a little celebrity gossip, and in the tech industry that model seems to apply equally well. So the answer seems to be that it doesn't really matter whether it's truth or rumor, just as long as people are eating it up.
