I never liked the Fake Steve Jobs blog because I didn't like an author to be able to hide behind anonymity. When Dan Lyons, the then-Forbes and now Newsweek reporter, revealed his identity as Fake Steve Jobs and decided to continue blogging as Real Dan Lyons, I cheered. I know Dan and respect the reporting he's done over the years, even when it hasn't been favorable to open source.
Why? Because I can always count on Dan to tell the truth, as he sees it. Dan pulls no punches.
This past week, that tendency toward brutal candor caught up with him, as The Guardian reports. Dan lashed out at Yahoo! for lying to reporters like him and at The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher for conceit, only to have both blog posts removed. (I caught the Yahoo! post in my RSS reader before it disappeared. You can find it here.)
The Guardian seems to think such censorship is a necessary evil:
...[I]t must be tough for Dan Lyons. He could say more or less what he liked as Fake Steve because it was satirical (many a true word spoken in jest, as they say), and that brought him a big audience. He can't say the same sort of things as Real Dan and a Newsweek employee, so he doesn't have a big audience. And there certainly isn't enough money in blogging for him to give up the day job.
Are we happy about this? That Dan may have "bailed on blogging" due to pressure from Newsweek? I know I'm not.
Dan stepped over the line, perhaps, but I still prefer it to the watered-down non-news that most media publications shovel out. And, closer to home, Newsweek is talking out of both sides of its mouth in censoring Dan's blog. On one side, it apparently forced Dan to remove the posts. On the other, it headlines his blog in this way:
(Credit:
Newsweek)
So, which Dan Lyons does Newsweek actually want? The answer is most likely "both," but it seems to believe it can have both without the occasional bout of squeamishness. It's not going to happen.
The people who read Dan's work in Newsweek are generally not going to be the same people that read his Real Dan Lyons blog: grit in the latter does not affect his credibility in the former for 99 percent of the population.
That "grit" is sorely lacking in most reporting, which pretends to take a safe, neutral, and distant view on everything from Yahoo!'s change in executive leadership to child-rearing tips, perhaps afraid of the hovering specter of a lawsuit. Well, I for one am glad that Dan takes risks, even when I don't agree with him, and even when I think he steps over the line. Bring back the blog, Dan. We need the raw commentary.
I'm still laughing as I type this. Dan Lyons is always interesting to read, but sometimes his razor wit lays bare all the silliness of our technology-centric lives.
Take this post from last week criticizing the Web 2.0 bank heist, highlighted by a Scoble-led panel of Web 2.0ers at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference and its quest to find a good Boston restaurant:
My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.) this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve.
If I were funding these guys I might go home scratching my head about what those kids are doing with all of my millions. Maybe there is a point to what they're doing, but honestly, what great problem are these companies trying to solve? Sitting there watching this spectacle - watching these guys unable to simply explain what they do and and how they are going to make a business out of it - it was staggering to think that someone has entrusted these people with very large sums of money. But someone has. I weep for those people.
Oh, come on, Dan! It's not that bad. (OK. Yes it is.) It's bad because so many of our best and brightest are off making cuddly squeeze toys instead of software that will change our lives.
For example, what if these technology entrepreneurs were instead creating boring enterprise software that actually made financial services companies operate more efficiently? Better mitigate risk? It may not be something worthy of cocktail discussion, but enterprise software still matters because it undergirds an ever-increasing share of the world's economy. If P&G's ERP system fails, products don't make it to market. If Orbitz's website fails, people don't see mom and dad for the holidays. And so on.
If enterprise software were perfect, I'd be glad to see these developers off creating shiny baubles to occupy our free time. But it's not. We could use the ease of use and innovation of this consumer web within the enterprise.
I like Dan Lyons' blog much more now than when he was writing as Fake Steve Jobs. Same bite and same insight without the noise.
Take, for example, a post today on Valleywag's complaint about how Apple PR is managing information relative to Steve Jobs' health. I made an unfortunate decision to post on the subject earlier, got swatted by Tom Krazit, and now am following it from the sidelines.
Those sidelines, incidentally, are fascinating, as Dan's post suggests. Dan is a veteran news reporter and talks through how the Jobs story is playing out, by whom, and why:
[John] Markoff is a great guy and knows tech better than almost any other reporter on the beat, but he's also one of the reporters Apple views as friendly and trustworthy, which in the Valley means he can be counted on to play ball. Make of that what you will but there's a reason this story leaked out in the Times and under Markoff's byline, and it isn't because he's such a dogged, hard-nosed investigative reporter who's breaking down doors to get at the truth. Ahem....
You think it's a coincidence that just as the Journal was breaking its story about hedge funds hiring private detectives, Markoff at the Times happened to run into some "people close to Mr. Jobs" who knew about Steve's surgery and were willing to tell John Markoff all about it? Right. None of this is happening by accident. Apple PR is playing the Valley press corps, and the Valley press corps is going along with it, like they always do. Not so the hedge fund guys, who have real money at stake and don't care if someone like Katie Cotton [Apple's head of PR] yells at them. Frankly I'd be shocked if the hedge fund guys didn't already have people posted 24×7 at the Stanford Medical Center.
Fascinating, and I don't mean Steve Jobs' health. It's a fascinating glimpse into how PR works in the Big Leagues, from the pen of someone who has been involved in the thick of it for a very long time. Worth a full read.
Open Season Episode 12 was a very special session for us, as we got Fake Steve Jobs (aka "Dan Lyons") to join in. We spent a fair amount of time talking with Dan about his position on open source and why he gets so much flak for his coverage of the open-source community. Dan is hilarious and often insightful. It was a pleasure to have him on the podcast.
One of our best. Have a listen. (Also, the link provides my coconut cream pie recipe, which is definitely worth having.)
Dan Lyons, the erstwhile Fake Steve Jobs, has told Robin Miller that he doesn't hate Linux, after all. As Robin reports:
He told me that people who say he dislikes Linux are not being fair to him; that out of 70 articles he's written about Linux, 67 have been positive, and he absolutely denies that he is paid by Microsoft to write what he does about Linux, Apple, or anything else.
I think it's all in how he means "positive." "Positive" for Dan is somewhat different from positive for, say, 99% of the human race. :-)
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Dan Lyons has admitted that he's not perfect. But we already knew that. What I like most in his mea culpa is the humanity of it. It's hard to be a journalist. It's easier to be a blogger, because the stakes are lower. But to be a journalist for Forbes, the cost of getting something wrong is relatively high.
Dan took an aggressive line on SCO, originally in its favor and often against those who thought it had a specious case. At times he was wrong, as he says:
Others in that highly partisan crowd have suggested that I wanted SCO to win, and even that I was paid off by SCO or Microsoft. Of course that's not true. I've told these folks it's not true. Hasn't stopped them.
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