Recently I read a book called Flat Earth News. It was a detailed and an accurate description of the problems that news reporting faces today. One of the challenges described in the book, was the affect of the internet. As news houses need to be producing news faster and faster, and fill that digital space with more and more eye-catching (read: advertisement catching) content, it's usually quality that suffers. At the same time internet is chewing in their traditional income, so they cannot afford to keep as much professional staff on board.

Ironically, the industry that is enhancing the web, providing mobile web tools and even citizen journalism applications, is now suffering from its own handywork. I'm talking about coverage on Nokia and Symbian.




On July 6, the Guardian reported that Nokia would be dumping Symbian for Android. The Guardian referred "industry insiders" as the source. The article itself says that Nokia was not available for comments, but the "news" was later denied by Nokia, saying it "has no truth to it whatsoever". We don't know how hard Guardian tried to reach Nokia for comments, but understanding internet times, I would guess their ideal response time would be in minutes, not in hours. Guardian is also quoting analyst sources and report that Nokia's market share in smartphones in 2007 was 47%, but down to 31% by end of 2008. Why did they choose that number, instead of the 39% which is the market share from Q109? That would have been the most recent number at the time. Now in Q2, it's 41%.




On July 17,  the Forbes writes that Nokia is now facing a "Motorola moment", and says "The global champion is lagging behind an innovation shift spearheaded by Apple and even Toshiba". The article describes the Motorola moment as follows: "Once a giant of the handset world, Motorola got stuck with its Razor handset model longer than it should have done, failing to catch on to other innovations that were taking place in handset making, before losing market share in China to Nokia and in the United States to Apple."

The Forbes article mixes up smartphone markets in the US, and total global handset markets. I'm assuming that the journalist, and analysts he quotes, are all from the USA. It is understandable and human to be viewing the world through your own market, but a journalist ought to be a bit more thorough. The many flaws of this article are reported by both comments directly to the article, and by Tomi Ahonen, so I won't go into those details here.




Also on July 17,  the BusinessWeek writes that Nokia is "dumping" a Symbian services unit. Nokia's press release says that Accenture is buying it, why would Business Week choose the word "dump"? Someone commenting on Tomi Ahonen's blog says the if he didn't know any better it would appear as if there's a conspiracy against Nokia. I don't know about that, but it does seem odd choice of words from Business Week.

Once again the journalist dug up an "expert" quoting in the article that "Nokia is distancing itself from Symbian",  and even hinting that Nokia would be choosing Android. Is this because of the false story on the Guardian? Again, the mistakes of this article are corrected by the commenters. I can assure everyone that Nokia is not distancing itself from Symbian. BusinessWeek clearly doesn't understand how giving away somethingdoesn't mean a loss of strategic importance, and vice-versa: tightcontrol isn't the best way to get your strategic assets to bloom.

                                                                                                                           
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I can appreciate the hurry, and sometimes it's not easy to get a Nokia spokesperson on the phone with only minutes warning time. There is a time difference to Finland, and for our comms person to find the right commentator within the company may take some time. We are all people with personal lives, we eat and sleep and are not standing in watch 24/7 for possible journalists to be calling. However,  it's difficult for me to understand how professional journalists cannot spend 15 minutes to make a few simple web searches, stick to the facts, and perhaps read the wikipedia if they are unsure of something. I hope the editors of these newspapers read the reader comments and make some changes to the way their articles are written.


(PS. This is a modified entry. There was a long draft version of this story published last night by accident. Sorry about the inconvenience. )