The Journal’s crushing scoop on Steve Jobs the other day—which said Jobs had had a liver transplant in Tennessee a couple of months ago—left competitors flat.

Generally when news like that breaks, the reporters who got scooped are sent off on one of the most humiliating jobs in journalism—calling sources and asking, rather pathetically, if they could possibly confirm the story for you so that you can report it to your own readers as straight news, crediting the competitor who got the scoop originally as far own in your own story as possible.

(Howard Kurtz has this down to a fine art.)

Anyway, the odd thing about the WSJ story is that it cited no sources in its flat lede, and backed up the lede’s assertions nowhere else in the story:

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part-time initially.

A hint to who did leak can be found in this key graph, similarly delivered with no sourcing:

At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery. As part of an agreement with Mr. Jobs in place before he went on leave, some board members have been briefed weekly on the CEO’s condition by his physician.

I don’t buy a lot of the complaints about anonymous sources, myself; much of the problem is just a subset of the game-playing papers get into with governmental officials, trading anonymity for incremental disclosures on an ongoing political agenda that have no real value for readers.

In other words, a big part of the vacuous use of anonymous sources are part of stories that are shitty in the first place. But it is fun to watch the papers enforce rules about it, producing some nice semantic juggling as they try to both still use the anonymous sources and simultaneously explain why the sources are unnamed

I suspect that this was a one-source story. The usual formulation would be to make the attribution as vague as possible: “… sources familiar with the matter said.” (The use of the plural in that phrase is one of the biggest lies in journalism.)

So it could be that the Journal decided rather than broadcast how flimsy their sourcing was they’d just go with a pronouncement from on high. More charitably, you can read it as a little bravura flourish. It intimidated the NYT so much, for example, that the paper’s follow-up could not only do nothing but report the fact that the Journal had reported the operation, but also didn’t even bother to state something that would cry out to be mentioned (and would, for example, be exhibit A if the story were later found to be inaccurate): That the WSJ, with an unusual disregard for big-time journalism’s first law, cited no sources for its information.