It's no new story that Apple goes to greater lengths to prevent outside leaks than just about any corporation in recent American history, but who knew that even employees working at Apple often have little knowledge of what's going on there?

Secrecy at Apple is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture. Employees working on top-secret projects must pass through a maze of security doors, swiping their badges again and again and finally entering a numeric code to reach their offices, according to one former employee who worked in such areas.

Work spaces are typically monitored by security cameras, this employee said. Some Apple workers in the most critical product-testing rooms must cover up devices with black cloaks when they are working on them, and turn on a red warning light when devices are unmasked so that everyone knows to be extra-careful, he said.

Apple employees are often just as surprised about new products as everyone else.

"I was at the iPod launch," said Edward Eigerman, who spent four years as a systems engineer at Apple and now runs his own technology consulting firm. "No one that I worked with saw that coming."

In a separate piece the Times dug into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jobs' recent liver transplant, going so far as to insinuate that Jobs may have used his wealth and status to his advantage in order to obtain a new organ.

Waiting times for a liver vary in different parts of the country, and people who can afford to travel are free to go to a city or state with the shortest wait and bide their time until they have reached the top of the list, a donor dies and an organ becomes available. Indeed, some patients rent apartments or stay in hotels near a hospital and wait for the phone to ring. It may not seem fair, but it is not illegal.

It is even conceivable that someone could go to the time and expense of registering for the waiting lists of several transplant centers around the country.

"If you had access to a jet and had six hours to get anywhere in the country, you'd have a wide choice of programs," said Dr. Michael Porayko, the medical director of liver transplants at Vanderbilt University, one of the Tennessee centers that has said it did not treat Mr. Jobs.

This isn't the first time the Times has called out Apple for its secrecy. In a piece published last July titled "Apple's Culture of Secrecy," Joe Nocera took Apple and Jobs to the woodshed over their unwillingness to divulge information about Jobs' declining health, which he speculated was the result of another bout with cancer, with company shareholders at the time, saying that Jobs "needs to treat his shareholders with at least a modicum of respect." This provoked Jobs to call Nocera a "slime bucket" in the course of denying that he was again battling cancer.

Since then Apple appears content to feed stories to the tech reporters at the Wall Street Journal, as they did with the news of Jobs' liver transplant that broke on Saturday morning, as well as a story earlier in the month about how Jobs was "starving to death" during a months-long battle with a mystery illness that left him unable to digest proteins. Near the end of May the Journal also reported that Jobs was, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, "healthy" and "energetic" and that he "doesn't sound like he's sick."

So while the Times persistent reporting on these matters may appear to be them lashing out at an entity they feel has disrespected them, the questions that they raise are valid and beg to be addressed, though one can hardly blame Jobs for doing everything in his power to hold onto to life. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal appears content to run with whatever scraps get thrown to them by Apple flacks, seemingly unwilling to question any of it out of fear of pissing them off, or not really caring one way or the other about the validity of any information they get fed as long as their stories get picked up by other media outlets.

Finally, at the risk of sounding morbid, you know how it's often rumored that rulers of totalitarian states have died, most recently in Cuba and North Korea for example, but that government officials are keeping it a secret from the people they rule, going so far as to splice together old film and audio clips to create updated propaganda and employing lookalikes and body doubles for occasional public appearances? It's not that difficult to imagine Apple doing the same thing when Jobs eventually dies, which is well beyond creepy, but sadly something that doesn't seem entirely outside the realm of possibility.

Apple's Management Obsessed With Secrecy [New York Times]
A Transplant That Is Raising Many Questions [New York Times]

In his column this weekend on General Electric, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera never actually uses the word "bailout." He doesn't have to.

CNBC owner GE just cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression after denying it would do so. The company's stock price was cut in half in less than a month and by nearly two-thirds over two months.In April the company missed earnings by $700 million two weeks after assuring investors it would meet its numbers.

Nocera shows (without telling) where this trouble might end up:

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Citi, Morgan Stanley - they'd all come under the same kind of intense pressure, seemingly out of the blue, hammering the stock and blowing out the credit-default swaps while rumors swirled of imminent catastrophe.

CNBC has been aggressively protecting its right political flank against Fox Business News; it doesn't want to lose to Fox the way CNN did. As the two clips above show, CNBC has laid plutocratic cheerleading on just as thickly as right-leaning Fox.

Its anti-bailout rants will look pretty foolish, though, if GE falters and seeks government help, as Andrew Perez of The New Argument points out. Should investors trust a financial network owned by a financial disaster of a company? More even than GE's myriad other units, CNBC should hope it never has to answer that question.

[via The New Argument]

You'll recall how cocky Nocera, of the Times, was drinking with Bethany McLean of his former employer Fortune when the two decided they could END all other financial writing with the definitive opus on the panic of '08 (Nocera: "It will be a book for the ages"). Selling the title for north of $1 million didn't diminish the writers' swagger one bit. Times hotshot Andrew Ross Sorkin also scored a big book deal about the financial meltdown, worth $700,000.

But his Madoff book looks much more Hollywood-friendly. Hell, why do you think Variety broke the book-deal news?

Madoff's is a relatively straightforward tale of institutional capitalist greed (Madoff was Nasdaq chairman and friends with the right people), lax government oversight and mass deception. It servers as a kind easy shorthand for the entire, complicated financial meltdown.

Nocera, McLean and Sorkin's tales about the collapse of the investment banks, in contrast, involves abstract concepts like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, mortgage securitization, leverage ratios, overnight lending agreements, the Treausury, Fed, foreign investors and not one but several indistinguishable (to the public) i-banks at the center of it all. We'd buy a book about all that, and see the movie, but it's not going to fly off the DVD shelf at Wal-Mart.

Behar's story will make a great movie after it's published by Random House. What's more, he's kind of a badass, investigating Scientology for the cover of Time in the early 1990s, uncovering the famed FBI Phoenix Memo warning in advance of the 9/11 attacks and detailing Donald Rumsfeld's ties to North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Business journalism hasn't looked this sexy in a long time. You have to hand it to recent Wall Street Journal-buyer Rupert Murdoch: He timed this one well.

UPDATE: Andrew Kirtzman of WCBS and NY1 has a contract with HarperCollins.

UPDATE 2: Keith Kelly has more on the Kirtzman deal, including the advance: $250K.

Wall Street analysts estimate that Jobs, regarded as a perfectionist product visionary who has resuscitated Apple's business, adds some $20 billion to Apple's market capitalization. Apple's stock price, down 5 percent in after-hours trading, is expressing fears that genteel reporters can't: Could an ever-worsening illness have led Jobs to cancel his annual Macworld keynote?

Jobs underwent major surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer. Since then, he's believed to have suffered complications which led to his gaunt appearance — an illness Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, brazenly lied about.

Apple's official story: Trade shows are a boring, outdated form of marketing, and Apple has better ways to reach consumers. But Jobs made Macworld anything but boring through his theatrical unveilings. They caused such a frenzy that bloggers made an art of reporting on his every word in real time.

I don't expect Apple to comment on Jobs's health. He has made it clear he thinks it's nobody's business, calling New York Times columnist Joe Nocera a "slime bucket" for daring to ask. The stock market is giving voice to an impolitic concern: What will Apple look like without Steve Jobs?

Aren't troubled economic times usually marked by a flight to escapist entertainment, like James Bond films or cable shows about gangsters? And don't the best-selling business books tend to be bought by people looking to turn a profit, like say from the insights and life of Warren Buffett, now hitting shelves after the writer was already paid a $7 million advance? The number of freelance speculators tends to fall dramatically during a downturn. And if there's a miraculous economic recovery, no one's going to want to read about the bad old days.

The economic panic has been well timed, at least, for ink-stained wretches able to take some more profits before the slow-motion meltdown in their own industry is complete. The winners, per the Observer:

• Cocky Joe Nocera of the Times and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair (formerly Fortune) got the $1 million advance they dreamed of over wine, plus "a few bits" more. And they're going to take their merry time, publishing sometime in 2010.
• Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times (pictured) — who called out those nasty rumors about trouble at Lehman Brothers not three months ago — topped both Nocera and McLean, individually, with his $700,000 advance for an insidery "Woodward-style" account of the panic.
• Roger Lowenstein of the Times magazine, will focus on the week Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, AIG took a federal bailout and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America.

"This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record.

Nocera goes on to say, "because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me." Except then he does, through the neat trick of pointing out what Jobs didn't say.

Namely, Jobs didn't contradict anything the Times had written. Which means he doesn't have cancer, but ]has experienced digestive problems well beyond the "common bug" Apple PR had said previously he was suffering from.

Or at least that's the way Nocera reads things. Normally, one would be on shaky ground equating lack of a denial with confirmation. But Nocera had a conversation with Jobs and, in the wake of it and possibly informed by it, the longtime business journalist apparently felt comfortable enough to state the following:

After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

Of course, Jobs is free to communicate with investors through widely-available publications like the Times. It's hard to see how Nocera's column is any less accessible to them than, say, an Apple press release, or why Nocera, of all people, would be pushing for the latter over the former.

But at least the columnist found a way, however slippery, to mention Jobs' off-the-record conversation in print. One wonders how many other journalists have let their coverage be influenced by such chats without at least letting readers know they occurred in the first place.

[Times]

Apple's secretive ways have paid off for it in turning every product release into a marketing event. But by applying that same Kremlin-like opaqueness to its corporate affairs, Apple has gone astray. "By claiming Mr. Jobs had a bug, Apple wasn’t just going dark on its shareholders," Nocera writes. "It was deceiving them."

It's one thing for Jobs to lie about Apple's unreleased gadgets — for example, when he publicly dismissed the notion of producing an iPod that played video in 2004, even as Apple was secretly working on one. That kind of maneuver can be put down to competitive misdirection. But to extend it to the health of a public company's CEO? Unseemly.

As unseemly, really, as the Apple apologists among us who join Apple PR in repeating the mantra that Jobs's health is a "private matter". Wishing doesn't make it so. With Jobs personally accounting for a quarter of Apple's market cap, it's everyone's concern.

Apple's fans have a choice: They can join Jobs himself in insulting award-winning reporters like Nocera, and dismissing the whole affair. Or they can face reality: Steve Jobs let his personal flack lie for him — and they bought it. That must really bug them.

Dear Joe,

Hope you are well! How will Brangelina tote around their new twins this August? It certainly won’t be in two separate carriages.

With the widespread use of fertility drugs and an increase in women having children later in life (average age is now 31), twins — and children born in quick succession — are born in greater quantity now more than ever. But how is the market responding to this trend? And what are the tools out there to help parents deal with two tykes … and deal with them in style?

In a recent People Magazine spread of J.Lo and her newborn twins, Jenny from the Block and husband Marc Anthony were photographed outside their NJ mansion, each pushing an old-fashioned pram. Are Jen and Marc really going to each push a huge stroller around town every time they want to take the kids out? Probably not. Several years ago, Phil & Ted’s, the premiere maker of juvenile products, introduced the first in-line stroller; and this year updated it to include a handbrake and sleeker, chicer look, which has become a favorite of Gwyneth Paltrow and Brooke Shields. Sales of in-line strollers have quadrupled in the last few years as parents have become fed up with the struggle to fit cumbersome double strollers through doors and in to elevators. (Look for the J.Lo prams on eBay).

Phil & Ted’s, which is the Apple of juvenile products launching 10 new products a year that ameliorate the quality of life for parents, also produces a Traveller, which is a playpen/sleep solution that sleeps two newborns; and -– in fact -– doctors recommend that newborn twins sleep together in the first few months. Smaller (and less expensive than a crib) the Traveller is lightweight and portable. In fact, Phil & Ted’s is the only fully diversified juvenile products manufacturer and boasts the highest profitability per square foot for retailers; and at just fourteen years old, Phil & Ted’s has an annual growth rate of about 120%, which is expected to treble in the next few years.

Children have become fashion accessories to parents who take them out and show them off not only in the park, but also in restaurants, chic resorts, and places that used to be the bastion of couples; which necessitates chic accoutrements to make them more mobile, like strollers, portable cribs and playpens. As our cultural trends change and evolve, it is interesting to examine how the market responds to the needs of new parents by producing innovative, new products that respond to every touch point in a parent’s day.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Best
Amanda

[Executive Suite]

[W]e're all surprised to see you carrying Carl Icahn's water on this one instead of someone at the Journal.

One of Rupert Murdoch's plans for the Wall Street Journal after acquiring parent company Dow Jones from the Bancroft family was to turn it into a broader-interest daily with a rightward tilt — an ideological counter to the Times in the way that Murdoch's New York Post and the New York Daily News divide the tabloid market. The Times has responded by taking more of an interest in Wall Street. Nocera, for his part, specifically calls out the Bancroft family for handling the News Corp. bid as poorly as Yang handled Microsoft's offer. Kudos to Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Jerry Yang, for noting that while ostensibly Nocera's rant is about the Valley, there's more than a little Times versus Journal backbiting going on as well, and we can expect to see more of it.

Dear Jerry, Congratulations. You got Microsoft to walk. You’re thrilled. Shareholders aren’t. You’ve become a pawn of the dominant company on the Internet. You think of Yahoo as your baby. It’s not your baby. Not since Yahoo went public. I can hear you protesting that Microsoft walked, not you. But how many times did Microsoft come knocking. Forced to negotiate, you rarely brought any of your investment bankers. You brought Filo. By May, Ballmer raised his offer. You claimed to be holding out for more, asking the only person interested in buying your company to bid against himself. You were creating incentives for a employee walkout after a change of control. Where does this leave you? Your days as Yahoo’s CEO are numbered.

It has been written here and elsewhere that Mr. Murdoch will eventually crack the Bancroft family's hold on Dow Jones. And if an owner were of a mind to use control of media to advance his own interests, that company would be a pretty nifty item to have in the tool belt.

Sure, when most people read the item on Friday, they probably just shrugged and said, "It's The New York Post. Whaddaya expect?" What would they say if it appeared in The Wall Street Journal?

We have another theory—what if Col Allan were punishing Richard Johnson by forcing him to finally eat some (still-tiny) lumps in public?

In non-scandal related news, Richard Siklos—who must be getting as tired of this story as we are—checks in on the Murdoch family. Guess what? They hit a rocky patch a while back, but now everything's fine! At an August management conference in Pebble Beach, all six of Rupert's children from his three marriages were together. Happiness reigns supreme throughout the empire. The Guardian suggests that Times of London editor Robert Thomson is in line to edit the Journal should the bid succeed, which has got to put current editor Marcus Brauchli on the side of the recalcitrant Bancrofts.

Back to Nocera: The former Journal reporter's column suggests that the paper's stock was so low in the first place because the Bancrofts lack financial acumen and tend to buy into whatever management suggests. This is a problem because Dow Jones management tends to consist of journalists, who:

...tend to be terrible businessmen; they lack the risk-taking mindset that marks a good chief executive. Making the kind of big, bold bets that C.E.O.'s have to make all the time in industries undergoing wrenching change, like the newspaper business, just does not play to their strengths, which are observing, critiquing and finding out things.