Apple has a track record of playing favourites with publications, so that a handful of journalists get treated like royalty while the plebs consider themselves lucky if they can extract a “no comment”. Of course, these very select American publications retain their editorial independence, but there’s always a hidden threat: they know that if they don’t provide the right sort of coverage, they can be excommunicated. And it looks as though that’s just happened to The New York Times.
Apple has just released a preview (beta) version of a minor upgrade to its Mac OS X operating system, so who got “the treatment” this time? One unexpected recipient was influential blogger John Gruber, from Daring Fireball. He has been called the Ultimate Apple Fanboy, though given the state of Apple-oriented journalism, there are many rivals for this prestigious title.
What’s interesting is that Gruber actually describes the treatment he got:
“We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d
been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product
briefing”. I had no idea heading into the meeting what it was about. I had no idea
how it would be conducted. This was new territory for me, and I think, for Apple.”
…
“The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announce-
ment event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply
with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead
of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others
from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR.”
Phil Schiller is Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing and used to be the primary stand-in for Apple’s top salesman, the late, great Steve Jobs. In that capacity, for example, Schiller unveiled the iPhone 3GS.
Someone with Apple Royalty status, such as The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, might well be blasé about this level of attention, but it’s pretty unusual stuff for bloggerdom.
Apple journalists did not have to work very hard to figure out why the New York Times was being blanked in Manhattan, its own back yard: it’s payback for publishing articles about Apple’s problems with the Chinese factory workers who actually make its products. And as The Washington Post noted, they got the message:
Says a source at the Times: “They are playing access journalism…
I’ve heard it from people inside Apple: They said, look, you guys
are going to get less access based on the iEconomy series.”
The amusing aspect of this story is that Apple is shooting itself in the foot. On American newspapers, the people who review products are rarely the ones who write about factory conditions and similar issues. For example, the New York Times’s biggest “crime” was In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad, published on 25 January, which was written not by tech columnist David Pogue but by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. And I don’t expect they care.
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