First it was Fake Steve Jobs, now it's Real Dan Lyons.
A frustrated Dan Lyons told me this afternoon that he is hanging up his personal blog at RealDanLyons.com after his Newsweek bosses made him yank a blog post where Lyons (rightfully) called Yahoo's PR staff "lying sacks of shit."
Lyons slammed the company after Yahoo flacks told him just weeks ago that the Google/Yahoo search deal was a "sure thing" and that Jerry Yang wasn't going anywhere. "Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever."
We aren't sure exactly how things went down, but the Yahoo PR post and several others are gone too.
Lyons slammed All Things Digital's Kara Swisher for touting an "exclusive" that Yang was stepping down -- an exclusive that was posted five minutes before Yahoo's official press release -- and then (mostly) tongue-in-cheek emailing other reporters who failed to note that she "broke" the story. Those highly amusing posts are gone from his site too.
In true whistleblower fashion, Lyons' redacted posts (copied before they were taken down) and a feisty response from Kara are reproduced in their entirety below:
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Jerry Yang out
And Chairman Roy Bostock says it's the right time for this to happen. I only wish you could have been on the phone for my conversation just — what — a month ago, when the same Roy Bostock swore up and down to me that Jerry Yang wasn't going anywhere because he was absolutely the greatest leader the world has ever known. "Nobody knows this company better than Jerry Yang," said Roy. "Jerry is the right person to continue to lead Yahoo." Roy also insisted that Yahoo did the right thing by passing up Microsoft's offer, even though the stock now stands at one-third the price Ballmer had offered to pay. See that story here. I'd never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they're really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo's attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true "inside story" of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they're fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah. Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.
One more thing: Will Microsoft come back to the table? And how much will they pay?
Real Dan Lyons Web Site 11/17/08 6:07 PM Dan Lyons Tech, Yahoo
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Kara Swisher: Everybody look at me! Not at Jerry! At me! At me! At me!
I just received an angry email from Kara Swisher of AllThingsD who chides me because in my previous post about Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo I did not mention that Kara Swisher actually broke this story today and got an EXCLUSIVE SCOOP on the BIGGEST STORY OF THE DAY!!!!! Just for the record, here is Kara's big scoop, which she posted today at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time. And here is the official press release from Yahoo hitting Business Wire at 5 p.m. Pacific time — a whopping ten minutes later. Kara, honey, I love you dearly, but girl-child, having a company send you a press release ten minutes before they put it on the wire isn't a scoop. That's called taking dictation. Best of all, here is the story from
