Kevin Wong of Motherboard looks at the history of tech news publication InfoWorld and how it changed how the media covered tech companies.
Wong writes, “InfoWorld also printed a fair amount of gossip. And that was the sort of thing that landed the staff in hot water with its subjects, especially when they reported on secret projects.
“‘About two weeks after I arrived at InfoWorld. I walked into the office of Senior Editor Paul Freiberger,’ said Markoff. [John Markoff was an early writer and editor for InfoWorld.] ‘He was about to break the story about Apple’s codenames: LISA and Macintosh. This was 1981. The LISA didn’t come out until 1983, and the Macintosh didn’t come out until 1984. And as I walked into his office, Paul held the telephone away from his ear, because somebody was screaming at him. And that someone was Steve Jobs.’
“‘He was infuriated,’ said Markoff. ‘And he was telling Paul that if he ran this story, the Japanese would be all over him and use it to their advantage, and that Paul was going to be responsible. We ran the story anyway. It was the first public airing of those code words, even though we still didn’t know what the technology was at that point.’
“Freiberger also remembers that day well.
“‘Jobs was angry at me,’ said Freiberger in an interview with Motherboard. ‘But he did calm down about it. We eventually had a nice relationship and spoke at length many times. But at the time, we were all winging it a bit, and so was he. He wasn’t used to dealing with journalists, and he didn’t like it.'”
Read more here.
