First: thanks so much for taking the time to read the post and even more so, for responding to it. I sincerely appreciate it.

I think you know the answer to your question, but I’ll give mine anyway. Your piece reported on information that was unknown; mine was a critique on something that had been published. For you, that missing information was central to the article: will Leopard ship with AirPort support? For me, what mattered was what appeared in your article. What happened during the process of writing it wasn’t important — what reached your readers was.

I think your rationale for wanting to get the article out and not wanting to say Apple refused to comment is perfectly reasonable. But unless you tell us as readers something, we have no way of knowing. To me, the answer would have been “Apple hasn’t responded to our questions yet, so for now, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

As I hope I made clear in my post, I’m a big fan of yours, both for your thoroughness as a reporter and your skill as a writer. In fact, as we’ve discussed, you’ve impressed me since the “InformINIT” days of yore. I do think, though, that readers don’t make as big a distinction between an online article and a blog post as you may think, and that journalistic standards should be just that — standard — regardless of where they’re applied.

Thanks again for your insights on this. Let’s continue the conversation at Macworld!

I did ask, and got no response. But since it was just a quick blog entry, rather than a news item, and it hadn’t been that long since I had asked, I didn’t feel it was fair to Apple to say “Apple didn’t respond.” (We eventually did get a response; we included that info in our feature on Time Machine later in the week.)

The blog entry was basically a way to give readers — who were asking the question frequently, and who were starting to buy drives to use with this previously-advertised feature so they’d be ready when their copy of Leopard arrived — a heads-up that the feature might not make it into the final version. Not much more we could say at that point, between NDAs, press embargoes, and the lack of an on-the-record response.