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Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

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Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#31

Post by ryanholiday »

holograham wrote: post #30

news corporations are just a proxy for what the public wants to know about. The news consumers (aka the market) dictate the type of news publishers report. Obviously we currently put a higher premium on covering apple launches and political conventions. If people did not want that, they wouldn't pay attention to those news outlets and subsequently those news outlets would either go under or change their coverage tren…

This is a preposterously naive understanding of how the news business works. Customers dictate what gets produced--no question--but so do a variety of other market factors. Namely, what is cheap and easy to produce for publishers. In the case of Apple news, these factors create a wicked cycle. Users click on shiny gadget stories and the news doubles down on such content because it's a lot easier and a hell of a lot cheaper to send a reporter to Cupertino than it is to send them to Baghdad.

ALL news can be made to be interesting and exciting. The problem is that the pay-per-pageview model heavily incentivizes blogs to grab low hanging fruit instead of doing the real (and often expensive) work of making the important news readable.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#32

Post by holograham »

ryanholiday wrote: post #31
holograham wrote: post #30

news corporations are just a proxy for what the public wants to know about. The news consumers (aka the market) dictate the type of news publishers report. Obviously we currently put a higher premium on covering apple launches and political conventions. If people did not want that, they wouldn't pay attention to those news outlets and subsequently those news outlets would either go under or change their coverage tren…

This is a preposterously naive understanding of how the news business works. Customers dictate what gets produced--no question--but so do a variety of other market factors. Namely, what is cheap and easy to produce for publishers. In the case of Apple news, these factors create a wicked cycle. Users click on shiny gadget stories and the news doubles down on such content because it's a lot easier and a hell of a lot c…

I disagree somewhat. It is true that certain news can be prohibitively expensive and/or completely barred by the country or another country however for the most part news that people care about enough to purchase and read will be obtained by a news publisher of some sort. We have already seen different business models develop to deliver news that would have been too costly to hire a team of dedicated reporters (e.g. Huffington Post). The fundamental rule of a free market should make news outlets proxy's for the consumers interests. This site in particular hosts numerous ideas where the current offerings do not match the consumers needs (sometimes due to market inefficiencies, sometimes due to new tech, sometimes due to new business paradigms that circumvent current legal/political impediments, etc). If the news industry is delivering news that is a hybrid of what the public wants and what is cheapest to report then inevitably there will be a business model that will spring up to deliver a better solution that optimizes for what people want and delivers it in a cost effective way.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#33

Post by saurik »

longarm wrote: post #13
saurik wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple spends less than Microsoft, but it is almost entirely on a single product (the iPhone). Product for product, Apple's marketing budget is immensely larger than other similar companies.

And the iPhone is a bigger business than ALL of Microsoft's offerings combined Per Vanity Fair: "Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft. No, really. One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created sin…

FWIW, because of your comment about "before 2011", I was purposely looking at data from 2008, to help control for that (when the iPhone wasn't yet that popular as the original device kind of sucked; the 3G had just come out, however, as had the App Store, so things were already on an uptick).

Looking at data from 2007, it seems like Apple was spending a third what Microsoft was on marketing, and had half the revenue; arguably then, Apple was spending 33% less than Microsoft on advertising per revenue, not really "a fraction".

However, you seem to be correct about now: I pulled some 10Q's from this year, and it seems Microsoft is spending $3.4b/Q for $17b/Q in sales ($6b/Q profit) while Apple is spending Apple is spending peanuts (although I honestly couldn't find the data I needed to verify this from the 10Q) for about $35b/Q in sales ($9b/Q profit).

While looking into that further (as I was especially bothered that I couldn't find the exact advertising numbers), I then came across this article, which looks at yearly data and comes to the same conclusion.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ycharts/2012/08/02/who-spends-mo...

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#34

Post by netcan »

jkn wrote: post #26
marze wrote: post #21

Polls say 1 in 5 in the US plan to get the new iPhone. Its release certainly is news if that is the case.

True, but the article makes the point that the causality doesn't go only one way.

Maybe so, but from the perspective of a single writer or publication that's just a why.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#35

Post by wpietri »

KirinDave wrote: post #18

I read it. The whole article. And all I can think after digesting what I read is, "U mad?" I think this journalist is just irritated that someone scolded them for "working the news cycle." And it's not clear why saying, "Well Apple's events are also over covered!" is somehow a dodge for "The RNC is being massively overcovered." P.S., If anything CES is undercovered. In the 10 years I've been following it I've never o…

You didn't read it very well.

A) he's not a journalist. B) He's saying that however much the convention coverage is a problem, tech journalism is a bigger mess. C) His point is pretty clear: journalism purports to be reporters working for readers, but that is no longer the case.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#36

Post by wpietri »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #16

Good for a company if they don't need to spend in advertising. For me, in an ideal world word of mouth if the product is good should be enough. Apple master the process of creating expectations and surprising people, in their staged announcements, good for them. Why the hate? envy?

Good for the company. Bad for people who think news hasn't been corrupted in the manner he describes.

In my case, the hate for things like this is that news has a purpose beyond enriching Apple's shareholders. In particular, an informed citizenry is vital to a healthy democracy. The constitution guarantees freedom of the press for a reason.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#37

Post by wpietri »

maxharris wrote: post #14

This article is wrong. I am always interested in hearing about Apple's products because they are so incredibly good, and the new features often have a dramatic impact on my life. The 2007 iPhone introduction showed me what my future phone would look like. The latest LTE feature on iPhone 5? Awesome because it means I won't have to hunt around for wifi once it becomes widespread. To sum it up, people care about these…

Is there somewhere in the article where he said that Max Harris doesn't want to read about Apple products? Otherwise, I'm not sure how your particular interest proves the article wrong.

Re: Apple’s Free Ride: Why Journalists Treat Product Launches Like News

#39

Post by randall »

KirinDave wrote: post #18

I read it. The whole article. And all I can think after digesting what I read is, "U mad?" I think this journalist is just irritated that someone scolded them for "working the news cycle." And it's not clear why saying, "Well Apple's events are also over covered!" is somehow a dodge for "The RNC is being massively overcovered." P.S., If anything CES is undercovered. In the 10 years I've been following it I've never o…

Spoiler alert: Nothing. Nothing is going on at CES. I went as a journalist for both Engadget and CNET, and despite the huge volume of posts, finding interesting gadgets was a rarity. Most of the time, a huge amount of companies end up over-promise/under-deliver-ing products at a grand scale.

I think CES is for buyers at chain stores to meet up with CE manufacturers. It doesn't really have a huge point, in my mind. I think a highly curated "cool tech" show could do a lot better, and allow in consumers. A Vegas cool-tech show / hype machine would be really interesting.

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