The Sorry State Of “Journalism”

Greetings from Éire’s driz­zly shores.

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to win me any friends; and may well alien­ate some of my read­ers; but fuck it, it needs say­ing. The big news in the Apple/iPhone media last week and this week is the story of how Apple denied App Store Access to a pro­gram cit­ing as the rea­son that the appli­ca­tion in ques­tion dupli­cated func­tion­al­ity built into iTunes. This, of course has been met with the usual hyper­bolic reac­tions rang­ing from approval to threats of mass devel­oper suicide.

Now, get one thing absolutely fuck­ing clear here. I’m not defend­ing Apple’s stance here. If this is, in fact, going to be Apple’s pol­icy going for­ward then the par­ties respon­si­ble should be hunted down and con­verted into Solylent Green until they relent. It’s stu­pid and short-sighted. That is, if this is an actual Apple policy.

See the thing is, so far, while I have read an ungodly num­ber of blog posts and news sto­ries about this, I have yet to read any­thing approach­ing the following:

An Apple spokesper­son con­firmed the policy.

Or maybe this:

When approached for com­ment, Apple denied the rumors and stated that a more defined pol­icy would be forthcoming.

Or even this:

Apple declined to com­ment on the story.

The bot­tom line is, I have yet to see any indi­ca­tion that any of the so-called “jour­nal­ists” cov­er­ing this story have even made an attempt to speak with any­one at Apple about it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, you can argue all day long that Apple needs to be bet­ter about com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and I’ll agree with you com­pletely. But that does not absolve “jour­nal­ists” from per­form­ing the basic func­tions of their jobs. You can­not sim­ply sit around and wait for Apple PR to do your job for you. Sadly, this level of “jour­nal­ism” seems to be par for the course in the tech media these days.

No won­der Apple seems to hold you guys with such disdain.

Bonus: My Completely Speculative Take On The App Store Shenanigans.

Since this is my per­sonal blog; and since I make no attempts to claim the title of “jour­nal­ist.” Let me give my take on what is going on with the App Store approval process.

When I look at the appli­ca­tions that make it into the App Store; as well as the one’s that don’t; I don’t see a pat­tern of cor­po­rate dom­i­nance. Fuck, I don’t see a pat­tern at all. What I do see is a badly man­gled process; that is prob­a­bly being “man­aged” by the front line approval team. I have this vision of a cube farm full of Customer Service mon­keys (not nec­es­sar­ily in the U.S.A.) mak­ing all of this shit up as they go along.

Is that a prob­lem. Yes. Is it the prob­lem the blo­gok­lein­bot­tle thinks it is? Not really.

Now, I’m off to eat some hor­rid Irish “cuisine.”