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

Apple doesn’t have to pay to tell people about its products, because the media dresses up the company’s product messages and presents them to the public as “news.” As the Huffington Post properly described it, Apple’s marketing strategy these days is essentially “hold off on the advertising, just sit back and let the media go hog wild.”

Meanwhile blogs and newspapers make no secret of the fact that Apple announcements are responsible for some of their biggest traffic days. Ars Technica, owned by Conde Nast, put out a press release last week bragging that its liveblog of the iPhone 5 launch “shattered traffic records.” In fact, Technica developed a proprietary blogging platform just to handle this spike (more than 15 million pageviews, or 500 percent greater than an average day). And when traffic, tweets and searches jump, every other publisher rushes to ride what an editor at the Christian Science Monitor once called the “Google wave.”

The result is fawning, marketing schlock that passes for news, online and off. And nobody, particularly blogs, wants to point it out because it’s all too lucrative. Democrats or Republicans look too rehearsed on stage? Let’s pounce. Apple? Let’s sweep it under the rug. Of course readers click posts about shiny new technology—these days it’s the only game in town.