Apple Inc. spent decades building a cult-like following in the education sector. From grade school, through college and into professional life, young people around the world feel a kinship with the company’s Macbooks, iPhones and iPads.

They also rally behind social responsibility causes far faster, and with more commitment, than older adults. Which is why Apple is playing with fire by not immediately and convincingly speaking with kids about the disturbing allegations in a New York Times article last week about sweatshop-like conditions at manufacturing facilities that make Apple products in China.

Granted, many middle schoolers do not read The New York Times. We still receive a hard copy at the house every day, but it wasn’t until my youngest daughter, Libby, 13, got to school Thursday that she heard about the Apple article — during a gathering of Model UN.

Thursday was the day Apple got knocked off a pedestal for Libby, who wrote the letter below and posted it on her blog. Today, she started asking me whether it was time to sell our Apple stock. All this from an eighth grader.

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an email to staff about the Times piece.  In the letter, a copy of which was reprinted by 9to5mac.com, the new chief executive said Apple cares about all of its employees and those involved in the supply chain.  He pointed to the Supplier Responsibility page on Apple’s web site for details on what’s happening in China and other places where Apple products are made.

It’s going to be hard work to get that message to every school kid using Apple products.

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From the “Being a Student in NYC” blog of Libby Armon, 13:

I sent a letter to Apple expressing my deep dislike for their factory in China. The letter is displayed below:

Dear Apple,

Have you ever considered having your Apple factory in the United States rather than in China?

If you relocated your factory to the US you would help create tons of jobs for Americans in a time where jobs are hard to find. Yes you would have to pay higher wages. However, I think that Apple would be benefited by the increase in respect that you would earn by relocating.

I thought that you not only designed your products in California but made them there too. In Model UN our teacher had us talk to Siri and ask her where she was manufactured or put together. Siri responded that she could not tell us and that the information we wanted was classified.

We then watched the film by the New York Times, “Made in China.” This video explained how Apple makes its products in China in a sweatshop. I know you think that it is okay to use this cheep labor because other companies might, but it isn’t.

People who buy your products do not want to know where they are getting their electronics because they know they will feel guilty. It seems your company feels shame also because you have Siri cover up for you. If you feel bad then maybe you should do the right thing and move your factory somewhere where you aren’t taking advantage of someone else.

Yes, I know you can do what you want and that Apple is more powerful than me but I can only hope you help improve your company morally. I am writing on an Apple computer right now, this shows how I do admire your craftsmanship with your products. Apple has been a key factor in positively connecting our global society. All I ask from Apple now is that you relocate your factory!

Sincerely,

Libby Armon

The backdrop for this post is snowy Cleveland, where I spent eight of my 20 years working in the commercial newswire business.  A short return visit this week to the Midwest — including stops in Chicago and Minneapolis — brought back a flood of memories that included many victories and a few business SNAFUs.

In the late ’80s, when spell check consisted of a well-worn dictionary sitting next to the editorial desk, we relied on eagle-eyed editors reading each press release aloud to a colleague before hitting the SEND button and distributing the copy to media across the nation.

Our earliest word processing programs –  like Xywrite,  Word Perfect and later, Word — helped catch many typos, thanks to internal dictionaries.  But, as former colleagues and competitors reminded me on my Midwest newswire reunion tour, spell check didn’t stop these doozies:

• In the personnel release announcing my appointment to PR Newswire, I was described as a veteran pubic relations executive.
• A release concerning a sensitive restructuring release for a leading carrier referred to the company as Untied Airlines.
• The surname of John Balch, CEO of vacuum cleaner maker Royal Apppliance, became Belch.
• A big box electronics retailer was rebranded as Best But
• The first name of Goldman Sachs went out as Goddamn

As I looked out my hotel window at the snowy streets of Cleveland and the gathering storm clouds over Lake Erie, I flashed back to those unpleasant phone calls with corp comm execs who rarely knew about the typos until we shared the bad news.  And the worst was yet to come.  After hanging up the phone, we inevitably transmitted a correction that called attention to our mistake and inspired guffaws among those reading the wire in newsrooms and brokerage houses.  The business relationships rarely survived those incidents.

So what’s the current state of affairs in the commercial newswire industry?  A quick search of “manger” revealed numerous instances of a livestock pen being substituted for the word “manager.”   My old favorite “pubic” also gets plenty of play, including a recent Oracle release.

I am leaving my hotel happy that I don’t have to call Larry Ellison’s PR team to grovel.

It was my first trip to Austin so, naturally I wanted to explore how such a culturally alive gem of a city thrives in a state long identified for its conservative values.

After sharing beers with dozens of hip designers, filmmakers, artists, software developers and social media pros at a tweet-up last night, I caught a glimpse of the Texas State Capitol. That’s when when I vowed to do more than just attend SXSW while in town.

So I went to the daily newspaper’s website, Statesman.com, to familiarize myself with the area.  The top local story was about a murder suspect being sentenced to death.  That’s when I entered the term “lethal injection” into the site’s search box to see if recent legal challenges surrounding that form of execution had been resolved.

The search results weren’t what I expected.  In one of the stranger examples of poor ad word management, Amazon popped up at the top of the paid search rankings offering “low prices on Lethal injection.”   It’s probably great news for Texas which, like every other state, has a large budget gap to close.

Let me be the first to suggest Texas outsource its lethal injection program to Amazon.  They’ll even throw in free shipping.

The media execs attending lunch at the Paley Center for Media Tuesday seemed relieved that they could take a break from watching their P&L’s get jackhammered by scrappy new entrants with tiny cost structures.

Not that the topic of conversation at this week’s schmoozefest, “The Great Digital Debate: Free vs. Paid Content,” was much of a diversion.

The biggest guffaws came when media futurist Shelly Palmer likened the media industry’s focus on free-versus-paid content to worrying about what song the band was playing aboard the Titanic.

The CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, sounded a shrill warning for news organizations who might be tempted to begin charging for their content on the Internet.

While acknowledging the difference between NPR’s charter, which prohibits charging for content, and commercial journalism, Schiller said pay walls demonstrated “elitistm” and threatened to alienate the very audiences with which media organizations should be engaging.

Steve Brill, the founder of American Lawyer and CourtTV, now runs Journalism Online. He dismissed criticism of his latest company’s business goal — to provide publishers with mechanisms through which they can charge for content.

Brill asserted that no news organizations have been able to survive on advertising alone, saying that publishers have always had to balance circulation revenue with advertising and other factors to arrive at the right mix.  One example he gave was the free magazines provided to passengers on the Delta Shuttle, on which hundreds of thousands of well-heeled business passenger have flown for years.  While readership could easily be puffed up through such giveaway programs, there was a price to pay on the subscription side of the business.

Commodity content — weather, lottery numbers and roughly 90% of the material most news organizations present on their web sites — would not be good candidates for subscriptions, cautioned Brill.  The other 10% could command a fee, and Brill claimed to have received 1,200 inquiries from “affiliates” eager to begin charging.

A video of the entire discussion was added today to the Paley Center website.

Most Americans associate summer’s three-day bank holidays with barbecues, trips to the beach and  family vacations.

I think of corpses.

Not that I am morbid or have a desire to work as an undertaker.  I simply had a recurring assignment early in my journalistic career to keep track of fatal car accidents on New York state highways each Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day weekend.  And I had fun doing it.

Working out of United Press International bureaus in Rochester and Buffalo in the 1980s, I was the only staffer on duty  between New York City and Cleveland Sunday mornings.  My task was to scan newspapers and check in with UPI’s stringer network — friendly news people at local TV and radio stations  across the Empire State — for the day’s top stories.   UPI paid $40 per story, though the company’s numerous bankrupcty filings made the promise of receiving a non-rubber stringer check a running joke.

On the long  holiday weekends, UPI’s state and national wires  kept a tally of the number of people killed in auto wrecks.  We called this the CAX count, an acronym that meant something like car accidents or casualties.   The National Safety Council, an advocate for seatbelt use, would make a prediction about how many unfortunate drivers, passengers and pedestrians would expire between midnight Friday and the end of travel period on Monday.

Vincent Toffany, who headed the safety council, understood that the news cycle was typically very slow on these weekends.  His organization received branding and reinforcement of their messaging.  The American Automobile Association used this release-news-when-it’s dead approach, too, as did gasoline price survey author Trilby Lundberg.

What used to infuriate UPI’s archrival, The Associated Press, is when our prowess on the telephones with state police or stringers would yield an extra victim or two.  In some cases, UPI would be a tad liberal by counting a drunk who died by falling off a highway overpass or the victim of a pre-holiday crash who succumbed after the clock struck midnight.  AP usually relied on “electronic carbon” stories from its member newspapers, which meant AP broadcast subscribers in New York got late, stale news.

In any event, the UPI totals got a helluva lot more airtime and print coverage because I had a higher CAX count every time.

With UPI a shell of its old self — it’s now owned by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its News World Corporation, publisher of the Washington Times — and Reuters and Bloomberg doing a nice job with international and business news, there’s little traditional wire service competition for AP in the United States.  But demand for content among local print and broadcast outlets is down, too, as they lose audience and advertisers to an increasingly fragmented online media landscape.

The Associated Press still makes a significant amount of money off its 50 state reports, thanks to correspondents covering legislative news in statehouse bureaus and a policy not to display the content online, where it could be pirated.  But a reduction in the size of AP’s editorial staff and similar news cutbacks among media outlets that used to feed items to AP, has left huge holes in coverage.

What’s filling the gap? Regional newspapers are banding together to form cooperatives that may make even AP state reports unnecessary in the years ahead.  The Ohio News Organization is one such effort.   Politico also represents a significant threat, as it readily barters editorial coverage of Washington news for advertising inventory in local media outlets and web sites.

There are also some dark horses in coverage of the nuts-and-bolts local news.  Atlanta-based CNN has its own editorial staff plus a large network of domestic radio and television affiliates that both broadcast content from and contribute news to CNN.  The so-called CNN Wire has not yet become a comprehensive state-level news service, but it could.

Not surprisingly, newcomers without legacy business hindrances seem to be doing a fine job breaking news locally and globally.   The micro-local Watertown, NY, site Newzjunky is kicking the digital ass of the century-old Watertown Daily Times and making money by selling advertising.

Twitter is the no-cost platform through which the Dutch news service Breaking News Online reaches the majority of its 1.1 million followers, though it is also emailing and using RSS.  In a short time, BNO has gone from solely aggregating third-party news content in under 140 characters to a growing amount of original reporting.  While there’s no apparent revenue model, it wouldn’t surprise me to see local, state, national and vertical beats pop up under the BNO brand as consumers get hooked on digesting tweets and SMS headlines.

The word “wire” is less about a strand of copper these days.  I think of it as an acronym — World Instantly Reached Electronically — and relish the fact that so many content producers are joining in the fun.