There is a blogger over at Wired who asks that you not send him any news. Bruce Sterling rather viciously and ineffectively called out a PR executive named Susan Wise for committing the sin of sharing some information with him.

On his Wired blog, Beyond the Beyond, Sterling wrote a post titled “I’m Suffering An Evil Tidal Wave of Blogsurfing Public Relations Spam,” and presented Wise’s thoughtful, reasoned pitch as evidence.

In her pitch, Wise responded to an earlier post by Sterling about the recent severing of Internet cables that affected a number of countries in the Middle East. She pointed out that thanks to the virtual networks, automatic rerouting and other services supplied by her client Virtela, Virtela’s customers in the region were unaffected by widespread Internet outages.

The irony here is that while Sterling’s original post about the cable outages was strictly a cut-and-paste job that consisted entirely of information from other published sources, Wise’s pitch included information that was both novel and interesting.

We are all dealing with information overload now, most especially journalists. Good reporters use automated processes of filtering their email so they stay organized and don’t get distracted. But reporters and bloggers presumably post their email addresses on their websites for a reason: to receive pertinent, relevant information that might make for a good story, one that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere.

In no way is Bruce Sterling’s rant analogous to Wired Editor In Chief Chris Anderson’s beef of a few months ago, when Anderson rightfully called out PR people for pitching him inappropriately and without bothering to read his prior reporting (I agreed with Chris at the time and said so on this blog).

In this case, the PR executive bothered to read Sterling’s post about the cable outages and wrote her pitch based on what he posted. Sterling is not editor in chief of Wire and presumably has a beat that demands more than cutting and pasting information that has been previously reported elsewhere.