Katie Cotton, Who Helped Raise Apple’s Profile, Dies at 57

“She was formidable and tough and very protective of both Apple’s brand and Steve, particularly when he got sick,” Walt Mossberg, a former technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said in a phone interview, referring to Mr. Jobs’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer 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.” Mr. Jobs died in 2011 at 56.

Ms. Cotton spoke tersely, if at all, when reporters questioned her, but she could be helpful when speaking off the record or on background.

“She was accessible, she was a point of contact,” said John Markoff, a former technology reporter for The New York Times, “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.”

Ms. Cotton also chose which reporters could speak to Mr. Jobs (even though he would occasionally speak, on his own, to journalists he knew well). In 1997, she invited a Newsweek reporter, Katie Hafner, to watch, along with Mr. Jobs, the first commercial in Apple’s new “Think Different” advertising campaign.

A tribute to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers,” a narrator intoned as the commercial opened with a still picture of Mr. Jobs holding an apple in his left hand; it continued with clips of people who changed the world, among them Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, John Lennon, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Edison and Muhammad Ali.