Agreed – but that isn’t that story. He painted a picture that was used on the cover of the New Yorker.

He demonstrated the ability to “paint” with a handheld device. He didn’t publish it. In fact – the publishers were good old fashioned traditional media.

This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be a production story.

Maybe it’s just a nice photo – created in a cool way. I guess that is enough but I’m pretty sure that’s all it is.

My point is that much of the technology needed to produce the raw materials of a publication is now available in hand-held devices, and that’s a worthwhile story on any journalism site. The fact that _any_ story about Apple products gets large amounts of traffic is almost incidental to that. I’m sure it was part of the New Yorker’s thinking – but not all of it.

He didn’t create the cover of a major magazine – he drew a picture.

No different to taking a photo and making that into a cover. Or taking a snapshot of a water colour.

The technology that is used to produce a magazine is still there…someone still took his pic, knocked it into shape, stuck a headline on it, formatted it for printing, resized it for online use etc.

The same as a photo. If anything, you could say, they are adding technology not shifting it downwards.

Let’s face it – if this was Microsoft Paint, rather than “cool” Apple it wouldn’t be a story.

Next week? Etch a Sketch?

Also – I thought this was interesting:

“Also odd: for quite a few weeks now, the magazine has been running full-page iPhone App Store ads on its back cover, making this issue a probable iPhone sandwich. Conspiracy!?!?”

http://bit.ly/FiDzk

Sorry, I maintain it’s not about shifting technology, downwards or otherwise, it’s not about a great work of art (although it looks great to me). It’s about Apple being cool.

And it’s probably about the New Yorker looking for a bit of cool to rub off on it (and keep advertisers happy).

Google: “Jorge Colombo” “New Yorker” – 42,800 results.

Looks like it worked.

Now, admittedly, there aren’t many products apart from the iPhone that can do this yet, but they’ll come.

Okay so their products are cool but the way they are treated is akin to a not-for-profit organisation. We don’t have to assist Apple – they are making billions – from us.

I fail to think of a company anywhere that is given so much unquestioning free publicity by the press. How much would you like to bet that this is a PR generated story direct from Apple?

Apple delights in ludicrous stories like people queuing for new hardware – when, on many occasions, there was never any suggestion that there was going to be a shortage. The media forgets to tell us this.

I can’t watch the film – local bandwidth not up to it – and I am sure it’s impressive. But why?

(Oh and that was 98% directed at the New Yorker and only 2% at journalism.co.uk)