Clarification at 7:02 a.m. PST: This article originally noted Silicon Alley Insider's report that Dan Lyons has been banned from CNBC. A CNBC representative disputes that assertion.
Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons, whose anonymous "Fake Steve Jobs" satire blog took the tech world by storm in 2007 went on a blunt rant on cable network CNBC that questioned its journalistic tactics--but contrary to a blog report, CNBC says he has not been banned from appearing on the network.
Lyons was facing off against CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief, Jim Goldman, in a segment about the sudden news on Wednesday afternoon that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would be taking a medical leave of absence following conflicting rumors and reports about his health.
Here's what happened: Gizmodo, a well-established gadget blog owned by Gawker Media, had reported that Jobs' health was "declining rapidly" and that his medical state was the reason that he would not be giving his traditional keynote address at the Macworld Expo. Goldman quickly shot down the rumor, citing sources; Jobs underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer in the past, but Apple had repeatedly insisted that he was now healthy.
Days later, Jobs said he had been diagnosed with a "hormone imbalance," implying that it was the reason he stepped down from the Macworld appearance. Goldman had been wrong. Then, on Wednesday, Jobs announced that he was taking the aforementioned leave of absence and that Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook would handle management in the interim.
"You can try to backpedal and say that what you reported was true," Lyons said to Goldman on CNBC, adding that the broadcast journalist had been "played" and "punked" by his sources at Apple, "but look, you should apologize to Gizmodo for having criticized them and apologize to your viewers for having gotten it so wrong."
He also took a direct dig at the credibility of CNBC, asking, "Why have a bureau out in Silicon Valley?"
Silicon Alley Insider later reported that Lyons had been banned from the cable network for life. CNBC spokesman Kevin Goldman told CNET News that this is not true and that Lyons has not been banned from the network.
Lyons, while an editor at Forbes, started the anonymous "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs" blog and continued writing it, even after he was outed as the author. He spun the blog off into a book, Options, and later left Forbes for Newsweek. Around the time he made his job switch, he stopped writing as "Fake Steve."
An additional correction was made at 8:40 a.m. PT. Dan Lyons used to be an editor at Forbes, not Fortune.
Dan Lyons, the author behind Fake Steve Jobs.
(Credit: Forbes)Fake Steve Jobs is no more.
Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer and soon-to-be Newsweek writer, announced Wednesday in a rambling post that he's shutting down the tech industry phenomenon known as The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. After it launched in 2006, the blog quickly became a must-read for anyone intrigued by Apple, its mercurial founder, and Silicon Valley in general.
Lyons played up some of the well-known traits of Jobs and Apple, such as the CEO's preference for mind-altering substances earlier in his life and the company's obsession with secrecy, to great comic effect. But he also wrote withering posts about other tech companies and executives from Jobs' point of view. The anonymous nature of the blog sparked a frantic guessing game as to the author's identity, which was won by The New York Times in August 2007.
Fake Steve became the main character in a humorous book called Options, but after Lyons was outed the blog seemed to lose some of its immediacy within the tech zeitgeist. Recent guest posts from the likes of Fake Jerry Yang never really generated any buzz, and Lyons' decision to leave Forbes for Newsweek had already put the future of the blog in question.
Lyons intends to start a new site under his own name in the coming weeks.
Daniel Lyons, creator of the Fake Steve Jobs blog.
(Credit: Forbes)Daniel Lyons, the creator of Fake Steve Jobs, is taking his show on the road.
Lyons is leaving Forbes, which has hosted FSJ since Lyons was outed as the creative force behind the blog last year, for Newsweek, according to Silicon Alley Insider.
Fake Steve himself confirms that some sort of hiatus is planned for the next several months, alluding to the recent "concern" over his health in unfurling a plan to spend several months recharging his irreplaceable internal battery on an island in the South Pacific.
Fake Steve was quite the sensation last year, but Internet memes come and go faster than 24-point leads, despite the fact that FSJ remains an amusing source of tech industry satire. Lyons will be taking the place of Steve Levy at Newsweek, who departed for Wired earlier this year.
Apple has dedicated the majority of the free space on its home page to honor company director Al Gore on having received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier Friday.
Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the coveted prize for their evangelism regarding the causes and effects of climate change. Apple put up a simple message honoring Gore on its site, as well as several news articles about the prize in its "Hot News" section.
The prize also spurred Fake Steve Jobs into a frenzy of posts Friday praising Gore and urging him to run for president in 2008, a notion which the Real Al Gore has downplayed but refused to rule out entirely. "You're like Obi-Wan Kenobi--struck down, you have become more powerful than we could ever have imagined," Fake Steve wrote, just months after a series of posts lamenting a depressed Al Gore loitering on his couch playing Wii, unable to get motivated. Looks like he's doing better these days.
The problem with insidery satire is that you're leaving a good portion of your audience in the dark. Almost anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley over the past 15 years, however, will find something to laugh at in Options, the debut novel from Fake Steve Jobs due out November 1.
Forbes' Dan Lyons, the real Fake Steve Jobs and the author of Options.
(Credit: Forbes)It's not The Bonfire of the Vanities or anything, but Daniel Lyons--the Forbes reporter behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog--has produced a delightful send-up of Valley culture, celebrity CEOs and the inscrutable mix of enlightenment and paranoia that's thought to inhabit the brain of the real Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. If you're Web 2.0, or, as FSJ puts it, "the guys (who) are wearing T-shirts and ripped-up jeans, and they've got those haircuts where you pay two hundred bucks to make it look like you just got out of bed," this book may not be for you. Of course, lots of people would laugh at a description of a drunken Bono trying to convince Jobs to hit San Francisco's infamous Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell adult theater.
Options is a fictional, behind-the-scenes chronicle of the six months or so in 2006 between the discovery of stock options backdating at Apple and the company's disclosure that executives falsified minutes of a board meeting in which Jobs was given backdated options. In the book, Jobs and his best friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (trust me, it works) ponder the mysteries of life and the inherent unfairness of a stock options witch hunt undertaken by a politically motivated prosecutor. The fictional interplay between Jobs and Ellison, usually over a few buds of the finest marijuana the earth has ever produced, generates some of the book's funniest moments and most outrageous anecdotes.
The cover of Options, which will make you laugh out loud but doesn't quite work as a novel.
(Credit: Amazon.com)When Apple receives a inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the company's stock backdating practices, Jobs enters the most stressful period of his life, at least since he wandered in the wilderness following his ouster from Apple by CEO John Sculley. In Options, Jobs is depicted as a spiritually enlightened health-obsessed creative genius with a messianic complex and a quick trigger finger when it comes to dispatching employees. But Options' Jobs is also prone to bouts of self-doubt and loathing--although no one but Ellison and Mrs. Jobs get to see that side of Steve.
The book meanders through the escalating investigation, which happens to coincide with the development of the iPhone. The opening scene depicts Jobs meditating in the Tassajara conference room at Apple headquarters over the circuit board of the iPhone, which won't be released for at least another year. Jobs insists that the circuit board of the iPhone must be as aesthetically pleasing as the exterior, even though no one will ever see it. But while it's fun to imagine the product development process at Apple, the book's comic genius is the people who inhabit Jobs' life, from real celebrities to Valley celebrities to a stereotypical Northern California acid-dropper named Breezeann who makes a killer fruit smoothie.
I laughed out loud several times, such as when Lyons describes Ellison and Jobs driving around San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin district playing a game where the object is to score points by shooting transvestite hookers with a water gun, a Godfather-like meeting of the Valley elite with Hillary Clinton, and a dramatic scene between Jobs and Yoko Ono that almost manages to evoke sympathy for Ono. Lyons treads carefully with his satire, because while some celebrities, (Ellison, Bono, Al Gore, Richard Branson) are identified with their real names, other well-known players are not, but are clearly identifiable (current and former Apple employees Fred Anderson, Nancy Heinen, Tim Cook and a hilarious version of Intel's Andy Grove).
Assessing 'Options'
Unfortunately, Options is a novel, and must therefore have a story arc--in this case, the arc doesn't quite work. It loosely tracks the real-world progression of events during the second half of 2006, culiminating with the run-up to Macworld 2007. I shouldn't give away the ending, but it's just weird, and probably was written assuming that Fake Steve would have kept his identity secret as the book was released. Lyons was outed by The New York Times while the book was in production.
Lyons preserves some of the hilarious writing style from the blog that kept the tech media world amused during the last year, but a novel is the wrong outlet for Fake Steve. The plot exists seemingly to kill pages between the funny anecdotes, and it steers clear of the skewering of Valley executives like Google's Eric Schmidt (known as Squirrel Boy to FSJ's readers) and Sun's Jonathan Schwartz (My Little Pony) to focus more on Steve's internal angst.
Still, it's an entertaining read for the tech industry veteran and a quick one, perfect for your next "nerd bird" flight between San Jose and Austin. This is one of those books that will sell inside a self-contained unit of insiders who will read it, have a few good laughs and then get back to the infinitely more interesting real world.
- prev
- 1
- next
