Steve Jobs, Apple and the business press

Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” had CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis on the show Sunday to talk about how deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs was able to manipulate the business media.

Here is an excerpt:

KURTZ: But let me come back to the standards that journalists apply. And I think part of it was the journalists in the tech field who cover this kind of thing, and who are enthused over every gadget, they wanted access.

And Jobs did build up relationships with certain journalists. And “TIME” magazine, as I recall, got the first advanced look at the iPad. And of course that ended up on the cover.

So they were very good at playing the press. They were pretty shrewd about this.

JARVIS: He was a master manipulator. And the irony here is that we’re in an age of scarcity, where anything can be said by anyone anywhere. And he held to a scarcity of information that made it more precious.

And we all kind of want to be that way today, but we can’t pull it off.

KURTZ: Right. But the irony, as we saw this week, the big buildup, as there always is when Apple even upgrades a product, about the new iPhone. It was supposed to be called the iPhone 5. Instead, it became the iPhone 4s. And there was a great sense of letdown as the product launch after Jobs had stepped down from CEO, of course, one day before his death, a great sense of letdown that it wasn’t, gee whiz, a revolutionary new product.

JARVIS: Well, it was also revealing I think that there was kind of a pall over this presentation, and I think now we understand better why. What I think the press will be doing now is probably going over board the other way — oh, my God, without Jobs, the company can be nothing. And we’ll see how that is.

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