How Apple prevents journalists ‘from asking really hard questions’

Good morning. Jeez, my phone suddenly seems so dated and useless. Here are 10 media stories.

1. What it’s like to cover an Apple event “The formula at these events is often the same: Apple invites select members of the press, who come and get their hands on the products and then write breathless stories filled with technical jargon and high-resolution photos. But this one was different. Gizmodo, for example, a publication previously banned for leaking photos of the iPhone 4 before its launch, was invited.” (BuzzFeed) |
   “You have to be able to control the journalist and prevent them from asking really hard questions,” a “source close to Apple’s international PR team” tells Patrick Coffee. (PRNewser, via Valleywag)

2. One more battery to worry about: The new Apple watch is “a big deal.” (The Atlantic) | “this is by FAR the richest, deepest, most elaborate smartwatch OS ever” (@Pogue) | “Apple Gets Intimate.” (Medium) | “In other words, Apple hasn’t solved the basic smartwatch dilemma, which is that smart watches use up far more energy than dumb watches, and that there’s nowhere to store that much energy in something the size of a watch.” (Felix Salmon) | Design note: Apple made a new typeface for the watch. (The Verge) | Oh yeah, the phone: “the true media news may be that the iPhones’ larger screen sizes stand to help publishers better weather the transition to mobile, where advertising rates have been inherently lower than on desktops.” (Digiday)
3. The Internet will be “slow” today: “Twitter, Netflix and Reddit will take part in an ‘internet slowdown’ protest in favour of net neutrality on Wednesday.” (BBC News) | “Slowdown Day will not feature any actual slowing down of the Internet.” (WP) | A proposed “Internet fast lane” means sites “including journalistic websites and start-up companies that could compete with established web services—could be slow to load, even as our expectations for loading speed leap ahead in the coming years.” (EFF) | Note: Don’t make a joke about your CMS.
4. Politico partners with Axel Springer to launch European edition: The German publisher “shares our obsession with building media companies that produce and can sustain nonpartisan journalistic excellence,” Jim VandeHei and John Harris write in a memo to staff. (Poynter) | ” It is still unclear who will lead the effort.” (HuffPost) | OK, but what happened to Rick Berke? “Politico’s management was reportedly planning to hand over greater authority to Berke, but for unclear reasons that plan never took effect.” (WP)
5. TMZ, considered: “There are a lot of stories on which TMZ absolutely eats our lunch,” Deadspin Editor Tommy Craggs tells Jonathan Mahler. “They have more money and better resources, and when they want to be, they’re every bit as gutsy as we like to think we are.” (NYT) | ICYMI: Anne Helen Petersen‘s “Down And Dirty History Of TMZ” (BuzzFeed)
6. Fight this generation: Ben Schreckinger writes about the plague of trend pieces about millennials, many of which, he notes, are written by older people: “older pundits don’t really want to understand us anyways; they want to tell us who we are, and receive validation in return—in the form of votes, or book sales or acknowledgement of their moral superiority.” (Politico Magazine)
7. Strongly, on a panel, a Times journalist speaks: “Our citizens are now being doomed by the policy of what Europe does,” New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi told a crowd at Columbia last night, referring to the fact that many European nations pay ransoms for their kidnapped citizens. “I’ve yet to see an American offical stand up and actually name the European countries that do this.” (Capital) | Callimachi wrote in July about how “Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.” (NYT) | Poynter’s vast Rukmini Callimachi archives: “The mistake a lot of foreign correspondents make is they get wrapped up in reporting what they think sounds important rather than what interests people.” (March 2013) | How she kept breaking stories from a trove of Qaida documents she dug out of an abandoned building in Timbuktu (May 2013) | That time she dug up bodies in the desert. (December 2013)
8. CJR destroys clickbait headlines: You can write good headlines for the Web without resorting to “come-hither pitches that overpromise on stories that underdeliver,” Michael Driscoll writes. (CJR) | FREEKY FLASHBACK: Remember when we complained about SEO-optimized headlines? (Slate) | Related: “Let’s start using clickbait for good” (Poynter)
9. Today’s front page, selected by Kristen Hare: An Austrian supermoon from Kleine Zeitung. (Courtesy the Newseum.)

    

10. Job moves, by Benjamin Mullin: Kim Kelleher is now publisher of Wired. She was president of Say Media. (Condé Nast) | Jeremy Colfer is now head of video for The Hollywood Reporter. He was senior producer for branded content at Sundance TV. (The Hollywood Reporter) | Andy Bush is now senior vice president of global accounts at Time Inc. Previously, he was international publisher of Time magazine and Fortune. (Time Inc.) | Carly Holden is now communications director at GQ. Previously, she was a public relations manager at W. (email) | John Woodrow Cox is a metro enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. Previously, he was a staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times. (@JohnWoodrowCox) | Job of the day: The Washington Post is looking for a fact-checking reporter. Get your résumés in! (Journalism Jobs) | Send Ben your job moves: bmullin@poynter.org

Suggestions? Criticisms? Would like me to send you this roundup each morning? Please email me: abeaujon@poynter.org.