Katie Cotton, who as Apple’s longtime communications chief guarded the media’s entry to Steve Jobs, the corporate’s visionary co-founder, and helped manage the introduction of lots of his merchandise, died on April 6 in Redwood City, Calif. She was 57.
Her demise, in a hospital, was confirmed by Michael Mimeles, her former husband. He didn’t give a trigger however stated that she had skilled issues from coronary heart surgical procedure she underwent a number of years in the past.
Ms. Cotton, who constructed a tradition of thriller by saying comparatively little, if something, to reporters, joined Apple in 1996 and started working with Mr. Jobs the following yr, quickly after he returned to the corporate after 12 years away. Apple was in poor monetary form on the time, however Ms. Cotton labored with Mr. Jobs to engineer a placing turnaround.
Together they crafted a tightly managed public relations technique as the corporate recovered from steep losses and turned out one profitable product after one other, together with the iMac desktop pc and progressive digital units just like the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
“She was formidable and tough and very protective of both Apple’s brand and Steve, particularly when he got sick,” Walt Mossberg, a former expertise columnist for The Wall Street Journal, stated in a telephone interview, referring to Mr. Jobs’s prognosis of pancreatic most cancers in 2004. He added: “She was one of the few people he trusted implicitly. He listened to her. She could pull him back from something he intended to do or say.”
Ms. Cotton spoke tersely, if in any respect, when reporters questioned her, however she could possibly be useful when talking off the file or on background.
“She was accessible, she was a point of contact, but sometimes it was hand-to-hand combat if they wanted to convey a story to the world and it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell,” John Markoff, a former expertise reporter for The New York Times, stated by telephone.
Ms. Cotton additionally selected which reporters might converse to Mr. Jobs (regardless that he would sometimes converse, on his personal, to journalists he knew properly). In 1997 she invited a Newsweek reporter, Katie Hafner, to look at the primary industrial in Apple’s new “Think Different” promoting marketing campaign, together with Mr. Jobs.
A tribute to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers,” a narrator intoned because the industrial opened with a nonetheless image of Mr. Jobs holding an apple in his left hand and continued with clips of people that modified the world, amongst them Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, John Lennon, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Edison and Muhammad Ali.
“I looked over and Steve was crying,” Ms. Hafner, who wrote about Apple for Newsweek and later for The New York Times, stated in a telephone interview. “I looked at Katie and I couldn’t tell if she was moved or feeling triumphant — I don’t know — but I was filled with admiration for her, because she knew how to play this and to give me access.”
Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of Time journal, stated in an e mail that Mr. Jobs “would call me five or six times in a day to tell me I should do a story or not,” and that Ms. Cotton would “frequently call right after and gently apologize or pull back something he had said.” He added, “She was very loyal, but she saw him in an unvarnished way.”
Kathryn Elizabeth Cotton was born on Oct. 30, 1965, in Washington, N.J. Her father, Philip, labored for a telecommunications firm. Her mom, Marie (Cuvo) Cotton, held varied jobs, together with caterer.
After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1988 with a bachelor’s diploma in journalism, Ms. Cotton labored at Dav-El Limousine in Los Angeles in gross sales, advertising and marketing and public relations earlier than transferring to the general public relations company Allison Thomas Associates. The firm’s expertise shoppers included Mr. Jobs, who was then operating Next Software. But Ms. Thomas and Mr. Jobs had a falling-out earlier than Ms. Cotton was employed round 1994.
“She was great at what she did,” Ms. Thomas stated in a telephone interview, “but it took a while for her obsessive work habits to become clear.”
In mid-1996, when Gilbert Amelio was Apple’s chief government, the struggling firm employed Ms. Cotton to assist with its public relations. “Katie did tech P.R. before it was hip and cool to do, and Apple needed someone with her experience,” Mr. Mimeles, her ex-husband, who additionally labored at Apple, stated in a telephone interview.
In late 1996, Apple acquired Next, which introduced Mr. Jobs again to Apple as an adviser. He would develop into the corporate’s interim chief government in 1997 and chief government three years later. That yr he elevated Ms. Cotton to run Apple’s public relations and communications and finally named her vp of worldwide communications, a title she held for a few years.
“When Steve came back, he didn’t just put key engineers in place,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vp of promoting, stated by telephone. “He put the right people in place to lead us around the company, and Katie was a big part of that.”
She continued to work for Mr. Jobs, whereas saying little publicly about his well being issues, till his demise in 2011, after which labored for Tim Cook, his successor, till she retired in 2014.
One measure of her affect was a headline in Macworld journal: “Apple PR’s Cotton departs: What it could mean for the press.”
Ms. Cotton by no means held one other company job. She did some company consulting and mentored younger folks at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, Calif., which her kids attended, and on the Riekes Center, a nonprofit academic group in Menlo, Calif.
Ms. Cotton is survived by her mom; a daughter, Isabelle Mimeles; a son, Ethan Mimeles; her companion, Jim Wells; her sisters, Lori Ann David and Patty Stewart; and her brother, Richard Cotton.
After Mr. Jobs died, the promoting company TBWA/Media Arts Lab screened a proposed industrial for Ms. Cotton and two different Apple executives.
“It’s sad when a founder dies,” the industrial started, Tripp Mickle wrote in “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” (2022). “You wonder if you can make it without him. Should you put your brave face on for the world, or just be honest?”
When it completed, Ms. Cotton was weeping.
“We can’t run this,” she stated. They by no means did.
Source: www.nytimes.com