the Informer

Apple has dominated the technology news cycle for the better part of a month now, for some things it intended to do and one big, embarrassing moment in company history.

One of Apple’s engineers left a prototype iPhone, expected to be unveiled later this year, on a bar stool just 20 miles from the company’s Cupertino, Calif. campus.
Gizmodo, the technology blog, paid an upwards of $5,000 to as much as $10,000 to get hands-on with a device that Apple had disabled using its “remote wipe” feature.’

I could probably go on for days about checkbook journalism that Gawker, the parent company of Gizmodo, and its owner, Nick Denton, employs. Paying for a story is such a disingenuous thing—it’s, in essence, a bribe.

But it’s hard not to feel as though Gizmodo did this to control a news cycle that Apple previously had a stranglehold over. Apple does continue to have that stranglehold, too. In an earnings call Tuesday, where Apple announced their biggest non-holiday quarter profits, not one journalist posed a question regarding the lost prototype iPhone.

One would venture to guess that every single journalistic outfit that was on that call had an article about it in their newspaper or website. That doesn’t mean paying for a story isn’t a bad idea (because it is), but when it’s a company like Apple, the reportage from Gizmodo thrusts that control away from an empire with such an authoritative hold on the public and media relations front.

But checkbook journalism isn’t the worst thing Gizmodo could have possibly done regarding this story. The blog revealed the name of the individual from the company who lost the prototype iPhone.

Thanks to Gizmodo, Gray Powell has become a name synonymous with this blunder. They threw him under the bus. Jesus Diaz wrote this lede to his article on Powell, “The Gourmet Haaus Staudt.

“A nice place to enjoy good Lagers. And if you are an Apple Software Engineer named Gray Powell, it’s also a nice place to make the honest mistake of losing the next-generation iPhone.”

The tone of this article is whimsical, and the narrative is mean-spirited. Later, we find out the guy lost the phone celebrating his birthday. Gizmodo didn’t have to release this guy’s name, they would have done just fine saying “Some guy from Apple lost this prototype.”

Joel Johnson, another writer at the site, wrote “foisting him into the public eye might help him keep his job at Apple,” but criticized for the way the blog did reveal his name.

Honestly, they didn’t have to put his name out there, so why do it? Gizmodo is in the business of making money and, hey, they’re out $10,000 from paying for that story to begin with.