I wanted to chime in here since I run a theme park news site and think this situation brings up a good discussion about ethical practices with Disney sites. I'm not here to impugn or malign Tom or his site. I've never met him.
Reporting on rumors in this industry is always going to be messy. You're not going to get people on the record. You're not going to get official confirmation when you want it. You've got tens of thousands of people working at WDW that could claim to have inside information, and it would be hard to verify anything they tell you. But if you wanted to, you could credit them as "someone within the Walt Disney Company." It's up to the individual site to decide whether whatever sources are telling you, along with labeling something clearly as a "rumor," is responsibly publishing information.
Speaking as a guy who used to report on state politics, sports, and health care, the standards of sourcing in this line of work would not go over well with editors in my past jobs. Is that just the nature of this beast or are sites reporting irresponsibly? That's up for debate, but let's not paint all blogs and "leakers" as the same.
This is also something that concerns me. Again, I don't know Tom and I'm not going to speak ill of him. But with the advent of Disney vloggers and social media influencers, the hope on Disney's end that offering privileged media access would result in positive coverage has turned into more of an explicit expectation: if you don't speak of this in glowing terms, even when you're writing a news story, not a review or opinion piece, you won't be invited back.
You may argue that they don't have to reward criticism with access, but did you also think it was fair when Disney temporarily shut out the LA Times from critics' screenings of Disney movies retaliation for a story about the company's political influence in Anaheim?
This isn't excusing injecting opinion about Disney and its executives into what is supposed to be a news story, because that's not something I would do on my site.
