Categories: OLD Media Moves

Covering Apple's Jobs a tough gig

Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman takes a look at how Apple CEO Steve Jobs is covered by the business media and comes to the conclusion that it’s not an easy job.

Friedman wrote, “Consider the ups and downs of Newsweek columnist Steven Levy, the author of last year’s ‘The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness’ from Simon & Schuster. For a quarter-century, Levy has been chronicling Apple Inc.’sÂ co-founder and mastermind behind the Macintosh computer, Pixar animated films, the iPod and more.

“When Levy, 56, first interviewed Jobs in 1983, he was a hungry magazine freelancer. Jobs was, well, Jobs. In other words, he was as opinionated and occasionally as irascible as ever.

“Jobs promptly launched into a diatribe about a Rolling Stone piece about MTV that he’d just read. ‘I had to tell him,’ Levy recalled with a wan smile, ‘Steve, I wrote that story.’

“How did Jobs react to that? ‘He certainly didn’t say ‘I’m sorry,” Levy replied.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.