> The "manipulative" implications the author is making could be applied towards print journalism just as accurately.
Yes - and it does apply. Editorial control and fact-checking are the two MOST vital aspects of good journalism. Any idiot - I mean, any Fox news anchor - can make up facts and report them.
A good app can greatly change behavior. I was an avid listener of This American Life, partly to their decent iOS app, bu quickly fell out of the habit when it became unmaintained. I still listened to podcasts by going to webpages manually. But I only recently tried using the Podcast app and it has had a huge change on how much more I listen to podcasts.
Although I happen to agree with you that podcasts were successful before being added to itunes, Apple's adoption of something seems to validate it for the mainstream. Google had tap-to-pay years before it showed up on Apple devices. Now that it's been made ubiquitous by inclusion on recent Apple phones many point-of-sale terminals read 'Apple Pay' and I've had more than one cashier question whether it works with non-Apple devices. LOL.
> podcasts being popular without Apple having to release an app for it.
Apple was arguably the MOST important distributor of podcasts, given that they had millions of devices (including iPods - you could download/sync podcasts onto the classic iPod) in the market.
I am also not picking up the "old media is better" vibe here. Non-fiction/investigative podcasts need quality control, editorial control etc. It's hardly a gatekeeper thing.
I do think, it wasn't necessary to plug that in the article, pod casts being popular without Apple having to release an app for it.
And whole article does seem like the old media('Gatekeepers are good' is a common theme at New Yorker) whining against the new.