Mediaboss Marketing

20 hours ago May. 9, 2014 - 2:00 PM PDT

Ask almost any professional writer who has covered the tech industry during the years from the 1990s dot-com boom to the Facebook-buying-drones-era what their most difficult assignment has been, and theyll almost universally identify one of the most iconic companies in American history: Apple.

In the years following the second coming of Steve Jobs, which saw Apple ascend to heights the tech industry had never before seen, Apples public relations effort was viewed with equal parts awe, disdain, and outright hatred. It was led by Katie Cotton, an executive who was as much an extension of Jobs brain as famed designer Jony Ive.

Apple confirmed earlier this week that Cotton is retiring. The last time I saw Cotton, she was hurtling toward me with an outstretched arm, successfully trying to ruin a photo (from an iPhone, no less) of CEO Tim Cook chatting with former Microsoft executive Steve Sinofsky on the sidelines of last years D11 conference. She leaves behind a PR department that has shaped the direction of tech PR in general, for better or worse.

Yet Apples notorious strategy of ignoring almost all media requests and inquiries unless it considered you an ally or had no choice but to deal with you was more than just the public extension of the culture of secrecy Jobs enforced. It was a response to huge demand for its products coupled with the willingness to exploit an obvious weakness in tech media business models.

The Wintel-driven tech industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was the primary story in tech media during those years, was much more accepting of media coverage than Apple, even when Apple was struggling. This was an era in which the tech industry was much smaller and more business-oriented than it is today. Microsoft, Intel, and its PC partners needed the fledgling tech media to spread its message and it needed a place to advertise its products before IT managers: Intel even invested in one of the earliest versions of CNET Networks, a company that later gainfully employed me from 2006 to 2011, and where I covered Apple as a single beat from early 2007 to 2009.

A product of that earlier era, Hubspots Dan Lyons who at one point somehow thought he could parlay a hilarious blog skewering one of the most revered technology executives in history into a serious job covering that very same company with top-level access highlighted several of the changing tactics Thursday that were used by Apple during its ascent, before going off the rails with a bizarre theory about masochistic journalists.

But he did touch on something notable about the Pax Apple era of the tech industry. It is no secret that during the years from, say, 2005 (the seminal event was probably the dramatic upstaging of the Moto Rokr by the iPod nano) through the launch of the iPad, no single topic in the tech publishing generated web traffic quite like Apple, just as the web was becoming the dominant medium for tech publishing.

Around the same time, a brand new class of tech media blogs was growing quickly, groups that were less interested in traditional notions of journalism and more interested in telling readers exactly what they thought about technology. This meant there was an explosion in tech content just as it was becoming clear how much consumers wanted Apples products, and somehow, demand outpaced supply.

See the rest here:
Why Apples PR strategy frustrated tech media for almost a decade