Stop me if you’ve heard this one. An Apple employee walks into a bar, orders a few beers, updates his Facebook status on his super-secret iPhone 4 (disguised as an iPhone 3GS), sets the phone on the barstool next to him and leaves without it. It gets picked up by someone else at the bar, handed off to a third party and ultimately sold to tech blog Gizmodo for a tidy $5,000. Oh wait, that’s not a joke, that really happened.

I didn’t write about this yesterday because I was troubled by the way the news broke. In the tech industry, journalists (myself included) are always looking for the Next Big Thing. Scoops are great — you can get a jump on your competitors and generate lots of traffic to your Web site. And in case you don’t know, traffic means revenue. Your visit to just about any Web site has a value assigned to it.

What scoop could be bigger than getting your hands on the next generation iPhone months before Steve Jobs will stand before the Apple faithful to unveil it on an enormous screen? According to Dan Nosowitz at FastCompany, a blogger who has written a thorough and informative explanation of the iPhone 4 saga from beginning to end, Gizmodo thought the story was worth $5,000 plus a bonus amount awarded based on the traffic the story generated.

Nosowitz says that the story has become the most popular one in Gizmodo’s history. Maybe it was worth the $5,000-plus bonus. But the method of getting the story still bothers me. For one, Gizmodo bought the unit from someone who didn’t technically own the device (unless you cite the playground rule of finders-keepers). In fact, fellow HowStuffWorks.com blogger Tracy Wilson pointed me to this blog post on The Guardian that says by California law, Gizmodo may have paid for stolen property.

For another, Gizmodo went on to release the name of the Apple employee who lost the phone in the first place. I’m sure that drove more traffic to the site but I don’t see how it is relevant to the story. Yes, the employee bears the responsibility of losing a very important piece of hardware and should be held accountable for that within Apple. But to release his name (and a link to his Flickr account) to the public seems like overkill. Did we need to know that? What kind of trouble will that bring the employee? I don’t know what his fate at Apple will be but I’d imagine his reputation will be tarnished with this story for a long time — and not just at Apple.

Gizmodo’s ploy feels risky to me. The Apple event is scheduled for June. That’s not too far away. Getting the scoop months in advance might drive traffic to the site but the story behind the story could cause more damage than the story’s worth. And ultimately it’s just a phone! Are we so obsessed with instant gratification that we can’t wait for an official announcement? Based on Gizmodo’s reported traffic, I guess not.