While it might have been several days ago that the blogosphere was being given a taste of yet another uproar by TechCrunch and Last.fm; I find the underlying issue of what happens between them disturbingly abandoned by the much-heated discussion that takes place afterwards. That’s why I decided to write this post.

It all began when TechCrunch published an article by Erick Schonfeld where they make public the rumor that Last.fm just handed over their users’ music listening data to the RIAA. Basically, they stated that Last.fm did basically just that, – albeit unknowingly, to help RIAA target some million users who have downloaded and played illegal music in their computer.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with Last.fm, they are a social network owned by none other than CBS that makes a good use of their music recommendation engine. When a user listens to a song ( and install Last.fm software in his/her computer ), the software will “scrobble” the song and send the data to the website, – telling it that such and such user played this song. This will in turn lead to a powerful music recommendation service because “you shift the song’s importance on the site. It’ll be recommended to different people, because you’ve listened to it. It’ll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.”

It’s important to pause here for a moment and not get ourselves get drowned in the details. To get into the background of what actually happened, – you can read the TechCrunch post here, Last.fm’s response here -, and a good neutral, third party post about it from Ars Technica here. As you would be able to see, a lot of the follow-ups / comments in the said posts tend to revolve around two big defensive fronts. Most of them were busy trying to define who is right and who is wrong, with some sporadic comments about other issues altogether, – like the legality of downloaded songs and its implications to worldwide music sales, and so on. This in itself is not wrong as it helps million of people learn about issues they otherwise might have not learned, but I feel that it masks the biggest, underlying issue of these all : responsible journalism and what it should have said.

It is worrying that TechCrunch based their news story on an uncorroborated rumor. Yes, the writer of the post tried to contact Last.fm and received an unsatisfying response which was not a categorical denial. But when it couldn’t be proven that Last.fm didn’t do it, – surely they can’t state as a fact that Last.fm did it ? For me, it’s a classic case of “my word against your word”, which is a silly thing to publish because it’s not a factual truth yet.

Granted, TechCrunch has maintained an understandable stance that they presented the story for what it is : a rumor. Schonfeld mentioned in his update of the post that “Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”

Fair enough. But still it seems to me that one can’t just publish every rumor he finds and call it journalism. It has to have a certain standard and, yes, ethical codes if you will ; where journalism can thrive and serve the general public responsibly. It is really saddening when many that take part in the uproar caused by the post fail to see this basic premise. Instead of petty bickering about who’s wrong or right, – don’t you think that we need to have a better standard of journalism ? I rest my case.