Three defenses for iPhone hype

Jack Shafer, Slate's ornery critic, lambasts the media's obsession with the iPhone. "No drop of milk oozes from the Apple teat without a crowd of journalists gathering to swallowing it up." It's a great line. But the Slate columnist, like others who wonder at the power of Steve Jobs' publicity machine, misses several layers of the argument: the specs of Apple's new wonderphone sell themselves; journalists are responding, not to Cupertino's mesmerizing marketers, but to their own readers; and the media excitement over the iPhone is not, in fact, unprecedented. Here, below, are three talking points for Apple fanboys.

First, Apple has indeed have dribbled out news about the iPhone — such as the extended battery life, the smudge-proof screen, and easy access to Youtube clips — quite strategically. The Slate columnist, among others, has noted the company's cleverness in building up excitement. But Apple also gets admiration for precisely the opposite strategy, when it holds back, with incredible discipline, all details of a product until the actual launch. Truth is that, when a company has a hot product to sell, its marketers will look brilliant, whether they dribble or withhold.

Second, Shafer never explains why, but he implies that reporters have some special weakness for Apple. Reporters certainly lean toward certain topics. Apple, since many writers use Macs and identify as the creative professionals to whom Steve Jobs speaks, is one of them. But they also love writing about other topics, such as themselves, which is why the media is full of so much self-referential media criticism. The only difference: Apple stories are popular. As Shafer will no doubt discover from the pageview stats on his Apple takedown, Apple product launches are the one guaranteed source of web traffic apart from a celebrity's nipple slip. At Gawker Media, our director of engineering's big annual test is the Macworld presentation by Apple's founder, every January. It is the internet's equivalent of the TV Superbowl. And reporters, even if they do so with personal enthusiasm, can hardly be blamed for serving their readers.

Third, press coverage for the iPhone is actually not that unprecedented. To be sure, Nexis shows 2,000 articles about Apple's miraculous new cellphone this month already, a total which I'd expect to see hit 5,000 by the end of next week. The phone already had a burst of publicity after it was first announced in January. In total, the iPhone's will have appeared in about 15,000 major newspaper articles — before it's even available for sale. That is, unless someone corrects me, the biggest wave of pre-launch press, for any new release, ever. But it's not an order of magnitude more. Nintendo's gaming remote, the Wii, got nearly as much attention when it first went on sale, last November. See the chart.

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