dashboards iTunes and the App Store. Yet Apple has another kind of resonance for Fortt: “In early 2000,” he says of his printjournalism days at the San Jose Mercury News – Silicon Valley’s hometown paper – “they gave me a beat covering a couple of companies that weren’t so central because I was new, companies they weren’t so sure were going to make it …” He pauses for effect: “Adobe and Apple” – his listener chortles. “That’s why I’m still employed today, basically,” Fortt says. “Because I started covering Apple in 2000 when not as many people were.”
His early days
“His [Fortt’s] work has kept CNBC in the forefront of technology coverage, which is vital for any business news organization.” – JAMES B. STEWART ’73, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist
The story of Fortt’s rise in sync with Apple’s is compelling, complete with close encounters with the late, legendary Steve Jobs. But Fortt first takes a detour to recount how he even got to that point at such a young age – considering that he’s still only 38. That journey began in Long Island, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., where Jonathan V. Fortt grew up the second son and third child of John Fortt, an architectturned-United Church of Christ minister, and his wife, Annette, a Pratt Institutetrained artist and teacher. “They don’t pay ministers that well,” Fortt observes, pegging his family’s mid-range economic niche. “But my parents were both graduate-school educated, so education was always very important.” Family was important, too. “I was really fortunate,” Fortt says. “I was the youngest in the family,” alongside older siblings Tavia and Steven, “and we had a lot of fun with my brother, who’s seven years older but still liked
playing with me. We spent a decent amount of time at church every Sunday, seeing my dad in the pulpit and hearing his messages. And school and creative endeavors were always important” – he mentions drawing superheroes and starting piano at age 5, paving the way for his lifelong love affair with music, both writing and performing it. “I remember the moves,” Fortt also says of his parents’ frequent need to uproot the kids. “I remember going through the brownstone in Bed-Stuy [BedfordStuyvesant in Brooklyn] and going up to the second floor bedroom and looking down at the backyard. I remember moving to D.C.” High school was pivotal, he says, for his discovery of journalism there. “I thought I wanted to be an architect,” Fortt says, but during the elective class, he decided computer-assisted drawing was “cheating – anybody can draw a straight line with a computer.” So he turned to yearbook: “All the cheerleaders were in yearbook.” But that class was full. His third, fateful choice? Journalism. “I thought, ‘I like to write. Well, I’ll take journalism.’ I kind of fell in love with it from there.” Of course journalism needs drama, and high school offered that, too, with early lessons in racial politics. Montgomery Blair High School, in Silver Spring, Md., which Fortt commuted to from D.C. because his mother taught nearby, needed to renovate. The problem was the school’s student body was too big for the existing site. So the Montgomery County Council voted to relocate a segment of students. Yet that would have marred the school’s cohesiveness as a place which had, as Fortt puts it, “white kids who grew up with black kids, who grew up with Asian kids, who grew up with Latino kids.”
SPRING 2015 DEPAUW MAGAZINE 21