Schreier: An explanation of rumors/reporting/sourcing
Hi everyone. I'm Jason Schreier, a reporter at Bloomberg News. I enjoy reading this subreddit but often see a lot of misunderstanding here about how reporting works, so I thought I'd make a quick post to help clear things up. If you've ever seen a rumor and wondered where it came from and whether to believe it, this might help out.
Let me break down where information comes from.
Secondhand sources
Nintendo's buying Microsoft? Well, I heard it from someone who heard it from someone...
Many of the rumors posted on this subreddit are coming from secondhand, thirdhand, or even more distant sources (when they're not simply made up). There are a couple of Discords where this kind of information is circulated, and often that gets out to the public through Twitter, podcasts, etc. Someone in localization for PlayStation passed along a message that got passed to someone who knows someone who dropped it in chat and bam, there's suddenly an account tweeting cryptic emoji.
These rumors sometimes turn out to be correct, but the further removed from the original source you get, the more likely that something gets garbled along the way. Also, the folks sharing information from these kinds of sources are less likely to be diligent about making sure everything is buttoned up. They're also more likely to be vague and cryptic because they know they don't really have the goods.
Single primary source
This is where people often get into trouble. Let's say I have a trustworthy source in Nintendo's marketing department who correctly told me about the next Mario and Zelda games in advance. So when they tell me that Nintendo is buying Microsoft, I believe it. But, uh oh, turns out they just heard that from a boss at the lunch line and didn't actually know for sure, and because I haven't corroborated it elsewhere, I'm totally wrong and have egg on my face.
Some of the stories you'll see on this subreddit come from reporters or rumormongers who heard their information from a single source with firsthand knowledge of the information involved. This is often going to be correct, but not always. Sometimes that source might not have complete knowledge or might be making their own assumptions about what's going on. For example, someone at Microsoft might have insight into what's going on at one of their subsidiary studios, but that subsidiary might also be managing up and making things seem rosier than they seem.
The recent Dead Space 2 remake debacle is a good example of when this becomes an issue. Most companies use code names to refer to a single project, but Motive used the same code name to refer to whatever the Dead Space team's next project was going to be. Let's say the code name was Water Bottle. It'd be very easy to hear from a reliable EA source that "Water Bottle" referred to "Dead Space 2 remake" (because perhaps that source saw a pitch document saying as much) but in reality, Water Bottle referred to an ambiguous idea that was continually shifting and "Dead Space 2 remake" was only one possibility considered.
So if your reliable EA source tells you that Water Bottle was in development for a year but recently shelved, you might interpret that as "the Dead Space 2 remake was in development for a year but recently shelved," when in reality it means that "this team's next project, which changed frequently, was in development for a year but recently shelved."
Most reporters/insiders/leakers/whatever have a hard enough time convincing a single person to share information with them, let alone multiple, so it's always tempting to share something when you've heard it directly from a primary source. But when you don't corroborate pieces of a story with more than one person, it's very easy to hear incomplete information and make assumptions or overextend yourself. (I have certainly done it!)
Multiple primary sources
If you see a story come from a major news outlet, it is most likely based on the reporter speaking to multiple people with direct firsthand knowledge of the information in question. Many professional reporters will sit on stories until they've corroborated them with multiple firsthand sources. If I had a dollar for every scoop I missed out on because I only had it from one source, I would have at least, I dunno, twenty dollars.
This is the gold standard at outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, etc. If someone has a pristine track record, this is probably the mantra they are following. It's very rare for a story based on multiple primary sources to be wrong, but of course it happens! Everybody makes mistakes, and there's a lot of nuance to gathering and sharing information.
Documentation
Video footage, screenshots, emails, audio recordings. This is also a primary source (and, when combined with testimony from the person who sent it over, often meets the standard I just described) although of course can be easily faked.
A good rule of thumb is that if you see a slanted screenshot or blurred footage on the internet somewhere, it's most likely phony, but if a reporter such as Tom Henderson describes the content of a game based on a video he saw that he says he can't share, it's probably real.
(It appears that some insiders over the years have also gotten their information from YouTube or blog backends, which I don't know as much about.)
In conclusion
The next time you see a rumor or a report, whether it's a reputable news outlet or some random Twitter insider, ask yourself what they know and how they might know it. Compare an account like Pyoro, which only posts concrete, tangible things about upcoming Nintendo Directs, to, for example, that one random dude with the Silksong avatar who has made vague, lofty claims about all sorts of games and publishers. ("It's a trilogy, but it could have more games in the future since it has become a very important IP." - lol come on)
Think about whether the person posting the information might have one source or multiple, whether those sources are secondhand or primary, and who might or might not know about this. And of course, pay close attention to the reporter's track record and go from there.
Hope that all helps, and good luck sorting through the pile of nonsense that is the internet!
