Katie Cotton ⇥ daringfireball.net

Katie Cotton — the person in charge of Apple’s public relations and, therefore, a large part of their voice to the world — is retiring. John Gruber closed an anecdote of one of his encounters with Cotton like so:

Most big corporations employ outside PR agencies. Not Apple. Apple’s internal public relations team is itself a world-class agency. That team was built entirely under Cotton’s leadership.

Cotton’s retirement rivals the departure of Scott Forstall and the retirement of Bob Mansfield as far as her importance to Apple and the mark she made on the company.