An article on the front of the Times business section reports on companies that are offering online banking services:
Several other established companies are also moving in. Acorn, which attracted four million customers to its investing app, is about to start offering its customers a debit card to spend their money. And SoFi, originally an online lender, has added a bank account offering this year. Even Amazon is rumored to be working on a checking account for younger customers.
"Is rumored" (with an online-only hyperlink to a Wall Street Journal article) just strikes me as a lame formulation for Times business coverage. The reason readers like me fork over hundreds of dollars a year to the Times is that it employs about 1,300 newsroom employees whose job is precisely to check out these "rumors" by doing actual reporting to ascertain whether the "rumors" are true or false, rather than just shoveling them along. If the Times doesn't have the reporting capability or resources to find this particular thing out, a way to handle that transparently would be with a sentence that said something like, "Even Amazon is exploring offering something like a checking account, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that the Times could not independently confirm" or "according to an anonymously sourced report in the Wall Street Journal that Amazon declined to comment on to the Times."
As a reader, what I want from the Times is news, not rumors. Rumors, I can get plenty of for free on the Internet.