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Comment by uxp | Hacker News Reader

> Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story.

Vice doesn't necessarily fall out of that category either. Smack dab in the middle is the statement:

"I still had outstanding questions, which I asked Apple ... The company has not yet responded."

The number of times I've read a developing story that has had that or similar in it is countless. Apple isn't known to have an army of PR representatives waiting for the next question to come down the pipeline, but it begs the question of how long they waited before publishing the story and just hoping they can update the story later while it's still getting pageviews.

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I wrote this article, I gave Apple 18 hours to respond. The article has now been out for four hours or so, and it's been close to 24 hours since I originally asked them.

Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument.

I understand what you're getting at, but Apple loses nothing by having the original story misreported—it ends up looking really good. Apple just straight up ignores reporters, all the time.

When I worked at Apple I was shocked, truly shocked, to find that their PR/Advertising was mostly handled by a company in LA and not done entirely in-house.

On one hand I get how secrecy works well for Apple, but on the other it gives them less control over Crystallizing Public Opinion and occasionally results in some pretty weak ads for uninspired product(s/ updates), like the 5s parts all coming together: beautiful but meaningless.

That really doesn't seem like a lot of time for them to respond. Especially given that for 10 or so of those hours, people are probably at home, asleep, or with their families.

I see what you're saying—but companies regularly respond to things like this very quickly. At least to say "we're looking into it" or "can you give us some time to respond." Apple and every other major company has people on call for things like this 24 hours a day, they have email on their phone ... the company saw my questions and chose not to respond. They still haven't responded or acknowledged it.

Apple's approach is to pick favorites, like Walt Mossberg, and then to play its handful of favorites off against one another. (Time gives you a bad review, Newsweek gets the next exclusive interview; or it's NYT vs WSJ.)

The rest of us are generally ignored, so we have to pick up scraps from the chosen few.

Obviously the big titles get more attention than small ones -- nobody has an infinite supply of time -- but companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel cope with dozens if not hundreds of journalists worldwide. They even deal with journalists that they think view them unfavorably.

Thanks for replying with clarifications for this article. I tried to imply that while I know Apple rarely responds to public or press inquiries, the question still remained on how long has elapsed before the author (you) moves forward with publication, but as a general sense applying whenever the author includes that language, here and on hundreds of other sites and applying not only to Apple, but to any company they are trying to get information and clarification from.

24 hours isn't terribly long, though knowing how fast Apple responds, if you don't get one in 12, then you probably won't get one in 72 either. For other companies though, what is a general grace period before moving forward with publication?

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