Longtime Apple reporter Philip Elmer-Dewitt is leaving Fortune to start a subscription site dubbed Apple 3.0, reports Peter Kafka of Re/code.
Kafka writes, “The move is worth noting in part because Elmer-DeWitt is a longtime fixture among Apple chroniclers. And in part because he’s going to try to go into business for himself. That’s a hard task, but perhaps more doable now than it has been in the past.
“Depending on your perspective, Elmer-DeWitt was either pushed out of Fortune, or he jumped on his own. Probably some of both, which is often the case.
“In Elmer-DeWitt’s retelling of the story, Aaron Task, Fortune’s digital editor, approached him last fall and told him he had to stop writing solely about Apple, which Elmer-DeWitt didn’t want to do.
“But it may be that Task simply didn’t want Elmer-DeWitt to write for Fortune at all. ‘He told me, ‘Frankly, I can hire three people for one of you,” Elmer-DeWitt said in an interview. That’s almost certainly true, given that Elmer-DeWitt started at Time Inc. in 1979 and worked his way up the ladder in an era in which magazines paid salaries that are hard to find online today.”
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