“The world according to Steve: Speculation swirls about Apple event,” a Contra Costa Times headline tells us today, meaning the latest round of buzz, rumor, and speculation surrounding wondrous, soon-to-be-unveiled product(s) from Steve Jobs & Co. is upon us.
As the Times lede says, “Waiting for the Macworld Expo keynote address is like waiting for the Academy Awards to be announced. People speculate for weeks, but there’s no way to know what will happen until the event.”
It’s still early — Macworld does not start until Monday — and a set of stories this week has not yet produced an article akin to the San Jose Mercury News‘s train wreck last time. But they do reveal several promising methods for enterprising journalists looking to milk a vaguely worded story (or two) out of the Apple buildup in the coming days:
1) Give a typical rundown of the possibilities, basing your story on speculation from bloggers, other journalists and analysts, while making sure to emphasize the Apple mystique.
The Times noted that “Bloggers and techies have been speculating for weeks” about what Jobs will reveal Tuesday, before it turned to another journalist for comment — in this case, Jason Snell, the editorial director of Macworld magazine — who said that “Apple likes to build excitement and remain mysterious and then do big product announcements … Apple is seen as a very innovative company.” (To get the point across, Snell later said “Apple is a company that thrives on innovation.”)
2) Use Apple “rumor and secrecy” as a news peg for a profile of a local tech company.
This was the tack taken by the Boston Globe, which declared that “Apple’s new gadget, dubbed the iPhone, has been all rumor and secrecy to date.”
The Globe reported that “the anticipation” of the iPhone has thrown local company Skyworks Solutions Inc., which is set to produce part of the phone, into the spotlight. “Skyworks officials declined to comment” about that — how they feel about “the anticipation” remains a riddle — but the company’s CEO did kindly speak about Skyworks’s business in general.
3) Rewrite one analyst’s note, focusing on said analyst’s scorecard of “Apple product rumors,” and call it a story.
That was the winning strategy adopted by the Associated Press, which noted that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, “who rated the certainty of several Apple product rumors on a scale of 1 to 10, gave a score of 7 to the company’s rumored 6th-generation iPod with a wide screen and touch-screen capability, for release in the next 6 to 12 months.”
Munster also called a “10 out of 10 chance” that Apple will release its iTV at Macworld, while spitballing a score of 6 out of 10 that during the “next 6 to 12 months” the company’s iPhone “will be available from multiple carriers, and not just Cingular as some have rumored.”
“Rumors around the iPhone,” said the AP, “have been floating for years.”
We’d say there’s “a 10 out of 10 chance” they’ll continue to flourish, in the AP’s quick and efficient hands or elsewhere, for several days more.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.