What's Worse, Anonymous Sources or Yahoo! Answers? An Investigation
Neighborhood curmudgeon Jack Shafer, now the last valuable property at Reuters, wondered yesterday whether anonymous sources at the New York Times were worse than the internet's top location for anxious teens, Yahoo! Answers, which felled one BuzzFeeD Benny (now just Benny). But obviously there's only one place to go to get an answer to that question.
Shafer was likely referring to a weekend article in the Times by Landon Thomas Jr., titled "Michael Bloomberg's Harder Sell," about the former mayor's projects post-reign. It included this quotation:
One rival billionaire, who asked not to be identified because he did not like to discuss publicly the charity efforts of his peers, wondered why Mr. Bloomberg was not making larger contributions. "You want to meet your unique capabilities," this person said. "Giving away $2 billion in one shot — now that would meet Mike's capabilities."
Why give a "rival billionaire" (we could probably narrow this one's identity down pretty quickly) anonymity so not to piss of his rich friends? It's chill, baby. It's just the news. It doesn't have to be all so serious and like, on the record. Have a martini. It's on Bloomberg.
So Shafer's question nagged at us. We posed it in Disputations, a Gawker staff side blog—but reader agray123 quickly recognized that Disputations was not the correct forum. Yahoo! Answers is. And so:
I guess we have our Yahoo! answer.