Snippet: Scooping Up the Apple Writers ☇

Gabe Weatherhead responding to comments by John Gruber:

I agree with John completely. I’m not sure if John is talking about blogs or professional web publications though. On a personal level I don’t find it very fun to write in this category as a blogger. It’s not a niche and there’s little companionship among writers.

But, maybe this was brought on by ourselves. Cross linking between blogs has nearly dried up. It’s almost impossible to find new opinions because everyone links to the same three websites, like I’m doing now.

This originally came up because Macworld alum Dan Frakes was joining Apple and while congratulatory, Gruber brought up this concern:

The talent pool writing about Apple products and platforms from outside the company’s walls is getting noticeably shallower. And on a personal level, this trend is not good for me, because I can’t link to App Store articles, because they’re not on the web.

I’ve been coming to terms with this over the last few months, even questioning the point of running a site like this. Every major tech site covers Apple exhaustively now because Apple has gone from something people wrote about as a labor of love to something any worthwhile tech publication has to cover. Throw in a who’s who of some of the best writers from Apple’s rough days and mid-2000s rise going to write at Apple, not just about the company and things start feeling a bit more generic and bleak.

It’s kind of like someone who kept a blog about the Golden State Warriors from the same timeframe—there were some awful seasons, fans bonded over a shared interest in the team, but competitors like the Lakers, Spurs, Celtics, Thunder, and any Lebron James team made all of the headlines. All of a sudden the Warriors became unstoppable and lots of people forgot they had been historically mediocre for much of their existence. Taking this analogy to its conclusion, this would be like the Warriors hiring away those who wrote about them before they were good and you start to see what’s left.