If you want to flog your car in the East London Advertiser’s classified section it’ll cost you about £30. A quarter page advert is around £350. A front cover ad on a national daily is probably a year’s wages for some people and a double page spread is not something most businesses can aspire to. So you’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs for dominating the papers, TV and radio for half a week with a revolutionary new machine that allows you to watch videos, surf the net and send e mails. It’s a bold and exciting concept that only a few hundred other companies had thought of beforehand.

Even The Economist felt that this new electrical gadget was the major news story of the week and gave the ubiquitous Jobs its front cover. The Guardian has demonstrated all the restraint of a crowd of teenage girls at a Miley Cyrus concert running with a front page and a double page spread on Thursday. Friday was worse with an in depth look at why Jobs wears such naff jeans and a bunch of people opining about the device. That’s a lot cheaper than journalism in these hard economic times.

I’ve spent literally three or four minutes trying to work out the reason for this outbreak of technological St Vitus’ dance. Mrs Mac owns an Apple Touch and there’s no doubt, based on my observations, that it’s a very clever little thing and at least as addictive as crack.  I think that is the answer. Faced with the option of reading, understanding and getting outraged by John Lister’s report London On the Brink which sets out in detail how PFI could lead to record numbers of beds and hospitals closing it’s a lot quicker and easier to toss out puff pieces describing what a clever computer can do.

As well as revealing something about the economics of contemporary journalism the iPad madness gives away something of the Weltanschauung of journalists. There seems to be an assumption that these gizmos loom as large in everyone else’s world as in theirs and that we have the need to be presented with five pages of coverage in two days about a box of plastic and wires, which as I understand it, is what is inside most computers.

You can’t blame Jobs for looking beatific in the picture. Lazy journalists have just saved him twenty gazillion pounds publicity for a product that isn’t even in the shops yet.

In the interests of balance if anyone at Apple wants to send me one I’ll be willing to give it a test run.