Skype: Overvalued or Not?

The second-most-emailed Technology story on nytimes.com is "Co-Founder of Skype Defends Its Value" a story published on October 10 but which carries an October 9 dateline. Now back on October 9, the NYT didn't have this story, but Reuters did. Except Reuters had the exact opposite spin on what Niklas Zennstrom said: they went with the headline "EBay overpaid for firm: Skype co-founder".

The blogosphere had lots of fun with the Reuters story, especially the wonderful quote from Zennstrom saying that Skype "overshot in terms of monetization" – an instant classic of circumlocutory corporatespeak which resulted in a well-deserved tweaking from the WSJ's Dennis Berman.

But the "overshot in terms of monetization" quote is nowhere to be seen in the NYT story; nor is it in the reporting from Red Herring's Neal Sandler.

It's at times like this that I wish reporters behaved much more like bloggers. We could have Sandler, and the NYT's Victoria Shannon, and Reuters's John Bowker openly discussing exactly what Zennstrom did or didn't say, and whether or not he thinks eBay overpaid for his company. But because they all purport to give us the objective last word on the story, anybody following the goings-on reasonably closely is just going to be confused.

And people who don't follow it closely will fall into two very different camps. There's the MSM-followers, who will read the NYT story and think Zennstrom is defending Skype's valuation, and there's the blog-readers, who will read the Reuters story and think Zennstrom is admitting that eBay overpaid.

For me, I just hope that the Reuters quote is for real. I mean, you really can't make that kind of thing up.