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sábado, 8 de outubro de 2011

Está marcado para segunda-feira um julgamento que poderá levar à penhora de mais de cinco bilhões de reais da Petrobras.


sábado, 8 de outubro de 2011
5:39 \ Economia

Bomba-relógio


A 16ª Vara Federal do Rio de Janeiro vai decidir o valor de uma dívida já reconhecida em uma ação popular transitada em julgado no STF. O processo refere-se ao delirante consórcio Paulipetro formado durante o governo de Paulo Maluf para encontrar petróleo em São Paulo.
Em agosto, a Petrobras depositou judicialmente 2,4 milhões de reais, valor que considera correto para a dívida por ter participado apenas da venda de dados sísmicos.
Já o MPF e os autores da ação popular afirmam que dezessete contratos com a Petrobras elevam a dívida para a quantia bilionária.
Por Lauro Jardim


Petrobras pode ter R$ 5 bi penhorados, diz revista

08 de outubro de 2011 | 16h 07


AE - Agencia Estado
SÃO PAULO - Julgamento marcado para segunda-feira, na 16ª Vara Federal do Rio de Janeiro, vai decidir o valor de uma dívida já reconhecida pela Petrobras, em ação popular transitada em julgado no Supremo Tribunal Federal, mas que pode ser elevada a um total superior a R$ 5 bilhões, de acordo com nota publicada na coluna Radar, da revista Veja.
O caso remonta à gestão de Paulo Maluf no governo de São Paulo (1979-1982) e à criação do consórcio Paulipetro, formado para encontrar petróleo na bacia do Rio Paraná. O resultado foi um fiasco, pois, apesar de terem sido perfurados 69 poços na bacia, nenhuma jazida viável foi encontrada.
Em agosto, segundo a Veja, a Petrobras depositou judicialmente R$ 2,4 milhões, valor que a companhia considera correto para a dívida, por ter participado apenas da venda de dados sísmicos. Mas o Ministério Público Federal e os autores da ação popular afirmam que 17 contratos com a Petrobras elevam a dívida acima de R$ 5 bilhões.








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Carpenter ensures Cards' season continues



Chris Carpenter was given a second chance to help extend the Cards' season and he took full advantage with a complete-game shutout of the Philadelphia Phillies. (Howard Smith/US Presswire)

October 8, 2011
PHILADELPHIA – Given a second chance, Chris Carpenter made sure the St. Louis Cardinals magical run would continue for at least a few more games.

Carpenter rebounded from a poor Game 2 start and outdueled friend and former teammate Roy Halladay, throwing a three-hit shutout to lead the Cardinals to a 1-0 win in the deciding Game 5 of the National League Division Series at Citizen's Bank Park.

"I think he'll remember this game forever," said manager Tony La Russa.

Left for dead in late August, the Cardinals made up a 10 ½ game deficit on the Atlanta Braves and won the Wild Card on the final day of the regular season.  Riding their momentum wave as far as it will take them, the Cardinals provided a stunning early exit for the team with baseball's best record.

The Cardinals won Game 4 at Busch Stadium to even the series, setting up the dream matchup between Carpenter and Halladay that everyone had hoped for. And boy, did it live up to the hype.

Just the third matchup of former Cy Young Award winners in a decisive game in postseason history, the Cardinals took a 1-0 lead just two batters into the game. A Rafael Furcal leadoff triple and a Skip Schumaker double to conclude a 10-pitch at-bat gave the Cardinals the early run they were looking for.

The one run was all Carpenter needed.

Providing a vintage outing that may go down as one of the best outings of his career, the right-hander allowed a double to Shane Victorino in the second, a single to Victorino in the fourth and a single to Chase Utley in the sixth. That was it.

"It's the best because it helped us clinch the series," said first baseman Albert Pujols. "He is just huge when it comes to a big time game. He has a Cy Young Award for a reason. He's been an ace for this ballclub for a reason over the last eight years. He came through once again for us."

Nervous fans watching back on television in St. Louis weren't helped by a couple of deep fly balls and close plays that could have swung the game in Philadelphia's favor.

With two on and two outs in the fourth, Raul Ibanez launched a deep drive to right that fell into Lance Berkman's glove just in front of the wall.

The Phillies then appeared to be in business following a one-out single from Utley in the sixth but Yadier Molina gunned him down trying to steal second to end the threat.

Ryan Howard flew out to right on a 3-0 pitch to start the seventh and Rafael Furcal turned in the defensive gem of the series with a diving stop up the middle to rob Carlos Ruiz of a hit in the eighth.

Utley led off the ninth with a deep drive to center that looked like it might tie the game, but Cardinals center fielder Jon Jay tracked the ball down just in front of the wall.

But when Ryan Howard's weak ground ball to second was fielded by Nick Punto and thrown softly into Pujols' glove at first, Carpenter's masterpiece was complete. So was the improbable upset of baseball's best team as the Cardinals earned a trip to Milwaukee for the  National League Championship Series.

"It was an unbelievable night," Carpenter said. "You have to look at all kinds of things. Roy Halladay is probably at this time the best pitcher in the game and we come out and were able to jump on him early and get a quick run, which was huge.

"I went out and was able to do the things that I wasn't able to do in Game 2, and that was get ahead in the count, control the strike zone with my fastball, and use my breaking ball when I needed to. You look at the whole game and everything that went on in that game, and it was just a tremendous job by our ballclub."

Carpenter needed 110 pitches to finish off his first career playoff shutout. The right-hander improved to 6-2 in the postseason, handing the Phillies just their seventh postseason shutout in club history.

Halladay wasn't shabby either, allowing just six hits and one run in eight innings. The Phillies ace threw 126 tough pitches, getting out of a bases loaded jam in the eighth unscathed to keep the deficit at just one.
But the Cardinals weren't losing on this night. Carpenter wasn't about to let them.

Thanks to another memorable performance from their right-hander, the Cardinals' unlikely postseason run will continue for at least another week. After clinching a playoff spot on the final day of the season, the Cardinals are now one of the final four teams still left.

"Unbelievable," third baseman David Freese said. "Can you believe it?"

Those that weren't believers of the St. Louis Cardinals earlier this month may be starting to come around.











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RIP Steve Jobs, Hong Kong student's Apple tribute is Internet hit



A Hong Kong design student said on Friday he was overwhelmed and felt "unreal" after his sombre logo in tribute to Apple founder Steve Jobs caused a worldwide Internet sensation.
The design, featuring Jobs's silhouette incorporated into the bite of a white Apple logo on a black background, has gone viral on the Internet since news of his death.
"I feel so unreal," Jonathan Mak, a second year graphic design student at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told AFP, after he was inundated with tens of thousands of emails and messages on his Twitter account.
"You don't get to 180 thousands notes without feeling slightly insane," the 19-year-old posted on another microblogging site Tumblr Friday, referring to the messages he has received.
Mak said newspapers in the United States and Germany have contacted him about buying the copyright to use his logo and had received job offers.
"I am flattered by the attention but I would like to focus on my study before taking on any full-time job," said the bespectacled student, adding that he was trying to cope with his new-found fame.
"I'm quite busy now actually as I'm trying to finish a school project."
When asked about whether he would be targeting commercial opportunities, Mak said he was considering contacting Apple on copyright issues because his design is based on Apple's own logo.
Some merchandisers have reportedly used his logo for commemorative memorabilia for Jobs such as t-shirts and caps that are being sold on the Internet.
"I will consider using any proceeds I make from the copyright for cancer research, as suggested by some people to me on the Internet," he said. Jobs died at 56 of pancreatic cancer.
Mak said he first came up with the design after Jobs announced his resignation in late August, but the logo received little attention at the time.
The teenager said the Apple founder had inspired him in his design.
"He was a minimalist, which is the way I would like to emphasise in my design -- fewer elements but a powerful message."
"Steve Jobs strongly believed in his own ideas and continued with his beliefs no matter how people criticised him. He was courageous," said Mak.

Apple tribute logo a Web hit

By Claudine Zap | Today in Tech 


Credit: Jonathan Mak Long
When Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in August, 7,000 miles away in Hong Kong, graphic design student Jonathan Mak Long, "shocked" by the CEO's departure, did what he knew best: He created a design to honor the Apple co-founder.
The 19-year-old posted the image, the Apple logo with the bite changed to a profile of Jobs, to his Tumblr blog. Known as Jonathan Mak, he initially received about 80 notes on the image. Then word came this past Wednesday that Jobs had died, after a long battle with cancer. Mak reposted the homage, which this time caught fire on the Web, attracting an almost immediate response of 10,000 likes and reblogs on his Tumblr site and surging to 180,000 -- in one day. Comments included "awesome invention like steve jobs." One thought it should be the "new Apple logo." Another wanted to "use it as a tattoo."
Speaking in fluent English (which he said he learned from watching the TV show "Friends"), the Polytechnic University School of Design student told Yahoo! in a Skype interview that the image was a tribute to Jobs's contributions to the world: "I wanted to commemorate him. He's such an integral part of Apple. I thought it would be fitting to include him in the Apple logo." Long added, "With Jobs gone, Apple is literally missing a piece."
The artist was inspired by the uncompromising personality of the creative genius. He said of Jobs: "He had this vision that he was not afraid to commit to. That's how he broke new ground. His commitment and belief in himself is what inspire me." The designer's vision for his own work is an aesthetic that joins a simple graphic element with a richer meaning, giving the viewer, as he put it, an "a-ha moment."
The cyber tribute that became a hit, and along with attracting media attention, the logo found itself as the preferred profile pic on Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account and on merchandise featured on eBay. While the design prodigy has received several job offers, but he hasn't acted on them; "I'm still a student," he said. The artist has a portfolio of minimalist design, but don't call him an Apple fanboy. "I just got my first MacBook Pro a year ago," he admitted -- and he still doesn't own an iPhone.
Asked whether he'd gotten any response from Apple, Mak said he had emailed CEO Tim Cook but so far hadn't heard back.

9 things you didn’t know about the life of Steve Jobs


Steve Jobs leans against his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs (Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis)

For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs in many ways remains an inscrutable figure — even in his death. Fiercely private, Jobs concealed most specifics about his personal life, from his curious family life to the details of his battle with pancreatic cancer — a disease that ultimately claimed him on Wednesday, at the age of 56.
While the CEO and co-founder of Apple steered most interviews away from the public fascination with his private life, there's plenty we know about Jobs the person, beyond the Mac and the iPhone. If anything, the obscure details of his interior life paint a subtler, more nuanced portrait of how one of the finest technology minds of our time grew into the dynamo that we remember him as today.
1. Early life and childhood
Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. He was adopted shortly after his birth and reared near Mountain View, California by a couple named Clara and Paul Jobs. His adoptive father — a term that Jobs openly objected to — was a machinist for a laser company and his mother worked as an accountant.
Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his estranged parents. His birth mother, Joanne Simpson, was a graduate student at the time and later a speech pathologist; his biological father, Abdulfattah John Jandali, was a Syrian Muslim who left the country at age 18 and reportedly now serves as the vice president of a Reno, Nevada casino. While Jobs reconnected with Simpson in later years, he and his biological father remained estranged.


Reed College
2. College dropout
The lead mind behind the most successful company on the planet never graduated from college, in fact, he didn't even get close. After graduating from high school in Cupertino, California — a town now synonymous with 1 Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters — Jobs enrolled in Reed College in 1972. Jobs stayed at Reed (a liberal arts university in Portland, Oregon) for only one semester, dropping out quickly due to the financial burden the private school's steep tuition placed on his parents. In his famous 2005 commencement speech to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: "It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."



Breakout for the Atari
3. Fibbed to his Apple co-founder about a job at Atari
Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal computing, mobile tech, and software, but he also helped create one of the best known video games of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was tapped by Atari to work on the Pong-like game Breakout. He was reportedly offered $750 for his development work, with the possibility of an extra $100 for each chip eliminated from the game's final design. Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak (later one of Apple's other founders) to help him with the challenge. Wozniak managed to whittle the prototype's design down so much that Atari paid out a $5,000 bonus — but Jobs kept the bonus for himself, and paid his unsuspecting friend only $375, according to Wozniak's own autobiography.
4. The wife he leaves behind
Like the rest of his family life, Jobs kept his marriage out of the public eye. Thinking back on his legacy conjures images of him commanding the stage in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans, and those solo moments are his most iconic. But at home in Palo Alto, Jobs was raising a family with his wife, Laurene, an entrepreneur who attended the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton business school and later received her MBA at Stanford, where she first met her future husband.
For all of his single-minded dedication to the company he built from the ground up, Jobs actually skipped a meeting to take Laurene on their first date: "I was in the parking lot with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, 'If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?' I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever since."
In 1991, Jobs and Powell were married in the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite National Park, and the marriage was officiated by Kobin Chino, a Zen Buddhist monk.
5. His sister is a famous author
Later in his life, Jobs crossed paths with his biological sister while seeking the identity of his birth parents. His sister, Mona Simpson (born Mona Jandali), is the well-known author of Anywhere But Here — a story about a mother and daughter that was later adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.
After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a close relationship. Of his sister, he told a New York Times interviewer: "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.'' Anywhere But Here is dedicated to "my brother Steve."



Joan Baez
6. Celebrity romances
In The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, an unauthorized biography, a friend from Reed reveals that Jobs had a brief fling with folk singer Joan Baez. Baez confirmed the the two were close "briefly," though her romantic connection with Bob Dylan is much better known (Dylan was the Apple icon's favorite musician). The biography also notes that Jobs went out with actress Diane Keaton briefly. 7. His first daughter
When he was 23, Jobs and his high school girlfriend Chris Ann Brennan conceived a daughter, Lisa Brennan Jobs. She was born in 1978, just as Apple began picking up steam in the tech world. He and Brennan never married, and Jobs reportedly denied paternity for some time, going as far as stating that he was sterile in court documents. He went on to father three more children with Laurene Powell. After later mending their relationship, Jobs paid for his first daughter's education at Harvard. She graduated in 2000 and now works as a magazine writer.
8. Alternative lifestyle
In a few interviews, Jobs hinted at his early experience with the psychedelic drug LSD. Of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jobs said: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
The connection has enough weight that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized (and took) LSD, appealed to Jobs for funding for research about the drug's therapeutic use.
In a book interview, Jobs called his experience with the drug "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." As Jobs himself has suggested, LSD may have contributed to the "think different" approach that still puts Apple's designs a head above the competition.
Jobs will forever be a visionary, and his personal life also reflects the forward-thinking, alternative approach that vaulted Apple to success. During a trip to India, Jobs visited a well-known ashram and returned to the U.S. as a Zen Buddhist.
Jobs was also a pescetarian who didn't consume most animal products, and didn't eat meat other than fish. A strong believer in Eastern medicine, he sought to treat his own cancer through alternative approaches and specialized diets before reluctantly seeking his first surgery for a cancerous tumor in 2004.
9. His fortune
As the CEO of the world's most valuable brand, Jobs pulled in a comically low annual salary of just $1. While the gesture isn't unheard of in the corporate world  — Google's Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt all pocketed the same 100 penny salary annually — Jobs has kept his salary at $1 since 1997, the year he became Apple's lead executive. Of his salary, Jobs joked in 2007: "I get 50 cents a year for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance."
In early 2011, Jobs owned 5.5 million shares of Apple. After his death, Apple shares were valued at $377.64 — a roughly 43-fold growth in valuation over the last 10 years that shows no signs of slowing down.
He may only have taken in a single dollar per year, but Jobs leaves behind a vast fortune. The largest chunk of that wealth is the roughly $7 billion from the sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. In 2011, with an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion, he was the 110th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. If Jobs hadn't sold his shares upon leaving Apple in 1985 (before returning to the company in 1996), he would be the world's fifth richest individual.
While there's no word yet on plans for his estate, Jobs leaves behind three children from his marriage to Laurene Jobs (Reed, Erin, and Eve), as well as his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.




Record thin on Steve Jobs’s philanthropy


For one of the nation’s most famous billionaires, Steve Jobs kept a low profile as a charitable donor.
Unlike fellow tech leaders Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he did not sign the Giving Pledge, the effort under which the nation’s richest individuals commit to giving at least half their wealth to philanthropy.
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From tweeting teenagers to titans of technology, millions around the world were mourning the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs Thursday. (Oct. 6)
From tweeting teenagers to titans of technology, millions around the world were mourning the passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs Thursday. (Oct. 6)
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Steve Jobs’s death leaves Apple facing challenges
His name is absent from the list of gifts of $1 million or more maintained by Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy.
And it wasn’t until after an unflattering media report about Jobs on the subject over the summer, that Apple in September initiated a “matching gifts” program, under which donations to philanthropies made by employees are matched by the company.
Now what will happen to Jobs’s fortune — Forbes has estimated his net worth at $8.3 billion — is a matter of speculation that is provoking discussion both about Jobs and the societal obligations of the very rich.
The most recent round of debate began after the New York Times published an unflattering piece in August, stating “there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity. . . . Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.”
Moreover, Jobs had closed Apple’s philanthropic programs when he returned to the company in 1997 and never reinstated them despite $14 billion in profit last year, the Times reported.
“Many other innovative companies have found ways to apply their ingenuity and resources to helping society,” Vincent Stehle, a longtime grantmaker in nonprofit technology circles and a columnist for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said Thursday. “It was a little disappointing not to see Apple at the table.”
But Jobs supporters note that the bulk of his contributions to society may reside in the quality and innovation of Apple’s products. They also pointed out ways that Jobs and Apple have been charitable.
Bono, U2’s lead singer and a noted activist, quickly responded to the Times piece, writing that “Apple’s contribution to our fight against AIDS in Africa has been invaluable.”
The company had given “tens of millions of dollars that have transformed the lives of more than two million Africans through H.I.V. testing, treatment and counseling. This is serious and significant. And Apple’s involvement has encouraged other companies to step up,” Bono wrote. “Just because he’s been extremely busy, that doesn’t mean that he and his wife, Laurene, have not been thinking about these things.”
Jobs’s supporters say it also may be impossible to know from public records what he gave away because he could have requested anonymity. Indeed, his plans for the rest of his wealth may not be known until well after his death.
The fact that he doesn’t appear on lists of public giving “doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not giving generously,” said Adriene Davis of Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, which tracks such gifts.
What may partly explain Jobs’s absence from the donor rolls is that he was so busy with his company.
Jobs’s most direct effort at philanthropy was when he set up the Steven P. Jobs Foundation, shortly after he was forced out of Apple in 1985. To run that effort, he hired Mark Vermilion, who first spent time at Humanitas International, a charity founded by Joan Baez, and then headed Apple’s community efforts, which began when Vermilion proposed the company give away computers to nonprofits.
Jobs wanted his foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism. Vermilion favored programs that promoted social entre­pre­neur­ship. But then Jobs got tied up building another company called NeXT and the foundation shut down.
“I said, ‘You really need to spend some time on this’ and he said ‘I can’t right now,’ ” Vermilion said. “I really don’t blame Steve. I think I could have done a better job on selling him on my idea or I should have done his idea.”
Had Jobs, who died at 56, lived longer, he might have gotten around to more public charities, Vermilion said, but because he was a perfectionist, he would have needed to devote a lot of his scarce time to it.
“He’s gotten a lot of criticism for not giving away tons of money,” Vermilion said. “But I think it’s a bum rap. There’s only so many hours in a week, and he created so many incredible products. He really contributed to culture and society.”












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Jesuit compares Steve Jobs to Pope Pius XI


By Staff Reporter on Friday, 7 October 2011
Jesuit compares Steve Jobs to Pope Pius XISteve Jobs: 'Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life' (Photo: PA)
Like Pope Pius XI, who founded Vatican Radio and built the Vatican train station, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs recognised the importance of expanding communication, a Jesuit has told Vatican Radio.
Jobs, 56, died on Wednesday, October 5, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Fr Antonio Spadaro, the new editor of the influential Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica, told Vatican Radio that Jobs made technology part of the lives of millions and millions of people, not just technicians.
“Steve Jobs had something in common with Pius XI and that is that he understood that communication is the greatest value we have at our disposal today and we must make it bear fruit,” he said.
Fr Spadaro said Steve Jobs had a “great ability to believe in dreams, to see life not only in terms of little daily things, but to have a vision in front of him. Basically, Steve Jobs’s most important message was this, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’ – in other words, maintain the ability to see life in new ways.”
The “stay hungry” quote was from a commencement address Jobs gave at California’s Stanford University in 2005.
On his own blog – www.cyberteologia.it – Fr Spadaro embedded a video of Jobs giving the Stanford commencement address and wrote about how some of his points echoed points made by the Jesuits’ founder, St Ignatius of Loyola.
Jobs told the new graduates: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
Fr Spadaro said that in his Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius wrote that one way of making an important choice is to examine how one would go about making that decision if he knew he were about to die.
“In the cases of Ignatius and Steve, death isn’t a bogeyman,” but is present as a reminder that in the face of death, the only thing that remains is what is truly important for each person, he wrote.
“I don’t know if Jobs was a believer,” the Jesuit wrote. In the Stanford speech, he said, Jobs was “speaking simply about the interior disposition one must have when making important decisions in life, focusing on what counts. No one, believer or non-believer, can make choices in life if he thinks he’s immortal.”
Under the headline “The talented Mr Apple”, the Vatican newspaper put news of Jobs’ death on its front page.
“Steve Jobs was one of the protagonists and symbols of the Silicon Valley revolution,” which brought changes not only in technology, was also a “revolution of customs, mentality and culture,” said L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.
Jobs was “a visionary who united technology and art,” the paper said. He was a man of “talent, pure talent”.











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On the Media: Steve Jobs and Apple vs. a free press




The man and his company's focus on control led to repeated fights with reporters.

Steve Jobs
In this June 9, 2008, file photo, Steve Jobs announces the introduction of the iPhone 3G during the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Reporters who covered Apple tell tales of being poked or prodded by the company for straying out of line. (Los Angeles Times / October 8, 2011)

As amply reported in recent days, Steve Jobs had verve, determination and a creative genius. Along with those admirable traits came a laser-like focus on control. Few felt the cold shoulder and steely elbows of the Apple chief like the media — particularly those who had the temerity to tell the story of Jobs and his company without his express permission.

The wave of coverage of Jobs' death this week at 56 rightfully centered on the products he created and the way they enhanced people's lives. That narrative won't be easily shifted; nor should it be.

But the glowing elegies came courtesy of reporters who — after deadline and off the record — would tell stories about a company obsessed with secrecy to the point of paranoia. They remind us how Apple shut down a youthful fanboy blogger, punished a publisher that dared to print an unauthorized Jobs biography and repeatedly ran afoul of the most basic tenets of a free press.

Photos: Steve Jobs | 1955-2011

Conventional wisdom will vindicate Jobs' media strategy. His products sold. His company grew to one of the biggest in the world. And reporters waited desperately for morsels about the slightest reconfiguration of the iPhone, iPod or MacBook. But because Jobs' command and control paradigm worked at Apple doesn't mean he was always right, or that his methods could be duplicated by lesser figures.

The tactics also created a perverse climate of breathless, under-informed speculation every time an Apple pod, pad or book was due for a launch or modification — which was essentially all the time. Addition of a data port on one device could draw oohs and ahhs in multiple stories..

"Not only did [Apple] introduce actually innovative products," Dan Gillmor, a longtime Silicon Valley reporter, said via email, "but it had the uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles."

One of the ironies of the digital communications age is that some of the greatest revolutionaries for transparency and human connectedness prefer to apply those principles to everyone else. (Google and Facebook are among the other tech giants that have made the Pentagon look pliant in comparison.) Apple "has taken stances that, in my opinion, are outright hostile to the practice of journalism," said Gillmor, a former San Jose Mercury News journalist and founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship.

Reporters who covered Apple tell tales of being poked or prodded for straying out of line. One writer told me of being on a conference call in which analysts discussed earnings for Pixar, the animation studio he helped create. Jobs began to trash the reporter's coverage, which turned out to be entirely accurate. She could only stew on the other end of the phone line because the call was arranged so the media could listen in but not ask questions.

Another reporter described trying, with futility, to get Jobs and Apple to comment for a story that described the origins of the iPod. After making sure there was no communication, Jobs sent a scathing email about the "many inaccuracies" in the piece. He proceeded to complain only about the degree of credit that should be given to one iPod designer.

Those are the kinds of quotidian (and survivable) slights journalists live with every day. More troubling was the way Jobs and his company identified perceived enemies and then targeted them with daunting obstacles and, in some cases, retaliation.

Apple went after a trio of websites that reported tips about the company and its unreleased products. It tried to force the small-fry bloggers to reveal their sources via the courts — a legal case that raised the question of whether new media were entitled to the same 1st Amendment protections as old. Fortunately, an appellate court understood the crucial role confidential figures play in reporting the news. It rejected Apple's position and preserved reporters' independence.

That decision did not resolve Apple's pursuit of Nicholas Ciarelli, the teenage blogger who ran the Apple-loving ThinkSecret. Even as Apple went after him in court, Ciarelli continued to publish excited speculation about upcoming Apple products like the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle MP3 player. That's the kind of buzz most companies would kill for. Instead, Apple wanted to kill the blog. It thought any leaks, even favorable ones, diluted the punch of its highly choreographed product launches with Jobs, in his iconic jeans and mock turtleneck outfit, as the star.

The case was resolved only when Ciarelli, by then a Harvard student and editor on the campus newspaper, agreed to shut down ThinkSecret. The settlement did not give the company what it really wanted — the names of those who had leaked to Ciarelli. But Apple reportedly paid a settlement to the young writer, and he agreed to cease and desist.

The secrecy imperative applied not only to Apple but also its founder. John Wiley & Sons learned that lesson quite viscerally in 2005. That's when the publisher dared to print an unauthorized — but not overly harsh — biography of Jobs. Apple struck back by removing all of the firm's books from Apple retail stores. That meant blackballing even Apple-friendly books and how-to guides — something like cutting off your mouse to spite your motherboard.

Last year, the company reacted in another fury in the case of the iPhone-In-A-Bar. The trouble started when an Apple engineer left an iPhone prototype in a Silicon Valley beer garden. The tech website Gizmodo conceded that it paid the finder of the phone $5,000, then dismantled the device and wrote a story reporting on what it found.

Paying a middleman for someone else's missing property might cause some disquiet. But even more troubling should be the ease with which Apple got a law enforcement task force to raid the Gizmodo writer's home. The writer, Jason Chen, had his computers, cameras and hard drives seized.

The law, as laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court, makes clear this should be seen as an intrusion on territory even more sacrosanct than, yes, Apple's Cupertino-campus — a journalist's work space. "A stranger's illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 2001 case.

Jobs' approach to the media could work only because he had the goods to back it up. Apple products truly changed the way people gathered information, listened to music and even perceived the world. The public always wanted to know what would be next. The full-dress pitching of each new product and modification became part of the Apple mystique. Many in the media felt compelled to play along. They felt there was no other way.

Photos: Steve Jobs | 1955-2011

Steve Jobs appreciated many things, big and small. But a vigorous, unbridled media was not one of them.










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