As I write this, I'm flying home to Chicago from my fifth trip to California this year to cover various Apple events. Doing these things can certainly be fun, and there's nothing else I'd rather do—I love my job. But covering Apple for a living isn't as glamorous as some people tend to think. In fact, it can be exhausting, frustrating, and downright dirty—and that's saying nothing of the in-air heart attacks.
Getting there
For most of us here at Ars (as with many other journalists and bloggers), we have to travel regularly in order to cover companies' special events. That means flying halfway (or entirely) across the country, and, especially in today's tightening economy, doing so on a budget. With Apple, sometimes we have very little notice before an event to book a flight and hotel, meaning that we may not be blessed by the travel gods with the luck required to get a direct flight.
This isn't a problem new to people traveling to cover Apple events, of course. Businesspeople who travel much more regularly tend to run into issues all the time and end up being late to (or missing) meetings. However, when you're from a site sending one or two people to cover a major event and something goes horribly wrong with the flights, the site could miss out on millions of pageviews, advertising dollars, and valuable exposure if those people don't manage to make it on time.
This almost happened to Ars with the most recent Apple event. Because of the short notice (five days) from Apple, we had to book connecting flights from Chicago to Las Vegas to San Jose the day before the event. Naturally, the flight out of Chicago was running late due to hydraulics problems with the wings. One hour and several returns to the gate later, we took off with very little time left to catch our connection in Las Vegas. Not long before we were going to land, however, someone on the plane had a medical emergency—a cardiac nurse on the plane said that a man in the back might be having a heart attack. We almost made an emergency landing, but the crew decided to ride it out until Las Vegas.
We landed 9 minutes before our connection was supposed to leave, and I watched the clock tick down while the paramedics rushed on and off the plane. When we finally made it to our connecting gate, huffing and puffing, it had just left. The next—and only—flight to the entire Bay area for the day was in four hours, and it was already overbooked. Things were not looking good.
If not for some crafty weaseling, Ars might not have been able to make it to Cupertino this Tuesday to see Steve Jobs in person (the horror!) unless we rented a car and drove from Vegas. Due to secret airline-wheedling mojo that we cannot share with you on pain of death, we managed to make it. Incidentally, the guy supposedly having a heart attack on the plane refused treatment once the paramedics got him off because he wanted to make his connecting flight to Pasadena. He missed it as well.
Finally, once you arrive, the travel gods sometimes display a juvenile sense of humor. You may not be able to stay somewhere that isn't rife with hookers in the lobby or decked out with poop-stained towels in the bathrooms. And I'm not saying that to be funny—I've stayed at both of those types of places while covering these events. Multiple times. Each.
We'll just leave it at that.
Cattle call starts at 9am sharp
So you're in the city you're supposed to be in, you got at least a half night's sleep after listening to the next room's headboard bang against the wall all night, and you're ready to rock. Great!
If you're covering Apple, you're likely to have been asked to show up at a certain time for registration before the event begins. This is one of the only times being on the press list can be a blessing, because unlike most Macworld Expo or WWDC attendees, you don't have to wait in line starting at 3:30am in order to guarantee a spot in the keynote.
The Apple PR people checking you in almost always recognize you even if you have no idea who they are—I'm convinced they have complete photographic profiles set up for every journalist on the company intranet—and you get handed a badge to wear that tells the many, many security personnel not to haul you out.
The media area before the
Macworld Expo 2008 keynote
That's when you join your herd—that is, your journalist and blogger friends from other publications who you see more regularly in a year than you do your own parents. Depending on the type of event, there may be hundreds of writers, editors, photographers, and videographers milling about, or just a medium-sized group (Macworld Expo, for example, will have a gigantic press crowd while Town Hall events on Apple's campus are much smaller). Once unleashed into the holding pen before the event starts, everyone starts watching the clock until the doors open into the hall. And when that happens, it doesn't matter how good a frenemy you might be with your fellow industry folk.
Watching what follows is kind of like observing a large group of children wait to go through a pair of tiny doors to meet the one and only real Santa Claus. There is no line; there is a giant mass crowding the doors. People cut in front of others to make it to the front. Some people run back and forth between several doors to see which one is opening faster—and if one is opening before the other, entire gangs of people will be seen sprinting to the other side in order to get in the hall exactly 15 seconds sooner than everyone else.
Some individuals will go so far as to physically shove others out of their way so that they can go running down the aisle in the hall and get the closest possible seat to Steve Jobs. In fact, this happened to me once courtesy of a prominent and well-respected tech personality—I was almost knocked completely on the floor. Security ended up yelling, "NO RUNNING! NO RUNNING!" in the hall after him, as if we were all racing each other to get into the McDonald's ball playpen and someone was about to be hurt. Actually, on second thought, that's exactly what it's like.
Now, remember, this is for an event in which we are all guaranteed seats in the same section. And, after chatting with others about the incident, this is not a terribly uncommon phenomenon. It has happened to others.
Doing the event and heading home
One question I get asked regularly is, "What is it like to watch Steve Jobs speak in person?"
People imagine that I can see his sweat glands glimmer as he talks about the new iPod nano, or watch fire come out of his nostrils when somebody in the audience asks why there aren't any Intel stickers on Macs. Unfortunately, that's not true.
Because I (and most of my journalistic brethren) are either liveblogging or taking notes for later, we rarely get to actually breathe and look up at the stage. Back when I used to cover Apple events solo, I used to tell people that the only times I saw Steve Jobs were through the lens of a camera in between frantically writing. During this last event, I didn't have to take my own photos (thank $deity), and so I saw Jobs even less. The words flow into my ears and out through my fingers. I barely have enough brain cycles to process what's being said, much less observe the halo floating over Steve Jobs' head or the RDF emitter wedged beneath his turtleneck.
Apple's Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, and
Phil Schiller taking questions
When Steve Jobs decides to take questions afterwards (which only happens in smaller events—not Macworld or WWDC), not everyone gets to ask theirs. He hand-picks certain individuals to ask their questions (the Chosen Ones), but only a few people get picked; many others get ignored.
After that, if new products have been announced, there is usually a general press briefing area where you can play with the new products, take photos, and ask questions of the personnel standing around. But don't go thinking you can ask just any question and actually get an answer. You're dealing with highly-trained PR ninjas here, and almost any question that is too technical or too trollish will get rebuffed immediately. Sorry guys, no xMac questions allowed.
When the event is over and everyone is done getting their photos and racing each other to Digg, the atmosphere relaxes a bit. If it's a conference like Macworld, you'll likely be stuck there for a few more days covering the goings-on of the third-party Apple ecosystem, which turns out to be a germy one. There's a 98 percent guarantee that you'll be going home sick when the whole thing is over. Just watch Twitter—every single Mac journalist, blogger, PR person, and developer arrives home from a week-long Apple conference with a bug that lasts a week or two. But everyone is still (usually) happy. And that's the entire point.
By now, there are undoubtedly many of you thinking to yourself that none of this sounds very hard and that we deserve the world's tiniest violin. But that's not the point at all. Despite all of these experiences, covering events like these is a joy. I enjoy being able to perform a service to our loyal readers and being able to have hands-on time with the products immediately after they're announced. Even after being delayed, shoved, slighted, and sent home sick five or more times a year, getting that reader e-mail saying "Great job! Thanks a lot!" makes it all worth it.
I'll do it over and over for as long as I can. Now, if only Condé Nast could hook me up with a sumo suit so I can take some of these f***ers down at the next keynote.
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