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
Comments
Thanks.
Despite all the drama, I think Yahoo's search engine is improving and Flickr is more popular than ever. I would use Yahoo more often if the homepage loaded as fast as Google.com. Call me crazy, I still type Google.com every time I search for something.
I am glad Lyons called out Kara Swisher on being entirely insufferable.
Has anyone registered FakeDanLyons yet?
Could we do a double blind and get Real Dan to blog as Fake Dan?
Dammit - Dan's blog was better than any digital-realm related content in Newsweek itself. What made the magazine wooden-heads think that putting Dan under a gag order wouldn't make them look like a gang of idiots? Or even, heaven forfend, as lying sacks of shit? Stay tuned...but not to Dan's blog. Unless, of course, he takes up the mantle of FakeDanLyons, as Mark Scrimshire suggests. Which, BTW, I find to be an utterly brilliant suggestion.
The last 5 posts on his blog which have been deprecated from his website are still visible via Google Reader.
I am SO sick of blog-boobs who only care about FIRST, regardless of how stupid or error-ridden or source-dictated or plain old foolish they may be. Who gives a **** if you are FIRST when your information is devoid of context, or authority or frakking accuracy? Build a ski-lift and get over yourself. I would MUCH rather wait, oh, an hour or so, for RELIABLE and MEANINGFUL and ACCURATE posts.
I gotta say, this Dan Lyons comes off looking even more petty than that Swisher woman. Also, if you're doing all your reporting through a corporate PR department, as this guy evidently was, you pretty much deserve to get burned. But even so, things can also change a fair bit in a month. Why compound what seems to this objective observer a case of reportorial dereliction with childish outbursts and snotty blog posts? Newsweek, I think, is 100-percent right.
Dan Lyons is awesome!
This article is complete validation of both Dan's journalistic integrity and his skill. So he's neither corrupt or stupid, as you freetards claim. He obviously did his due diligence on this one. He offered you several well researched options instead of just reading one press release and spewing it back verbatim.
That's your big criticism, right, FreeTards? With SCO either he was corrupt and participated in the pump-n-dump scheme, or he was too lazy or too stupid to check the facts coming from SCO and see what the rest of the world saw, that they were full of it, and either way he cost anybody who trusted his judgement a lot of money. Except SCO's investors, who were able to get out from under their piles of worthless stock.
Well, everybody can have an off day. He acknowledged he was wrong and apologized for all the name calling of people who thought he should have checked the facts rather than reporting the press releases as fact. And to show he was over it, he light-heartedly took a few more shots at them, calling them "nerds" and "amatuer slueths" since hes' the professional, and highlighting the irony that they were all exactly right while he was sniffing glue or something. You see what a great sense of humor he has?
I know, I know, next you'll be saying that he has a history of taking somebody's corporate line in the press only to have to retract it later, like with his hit-pieces at Forbes that always seemed to say Microsoft was great and whoever their threat of the week was, was not only not viable, but Bad for America. But he's learned his lesson. Now he gets mad about it! Look at how angry he got at Yahoo after repeating their PR flacks verbatim without fact checking and it turned out they were lying! Newsweak even made him take his posts off his blog he was so mad! If righteous indignation doesn't certify your sincerity I don't know what does. Never mind the fact that he said the righteous indignation of the open source community over the false claims of SCO only meant they were irrational zeaolots.
Bottom line, Dan rocks and you suck! Deal with it!
party hardcore,
hardcore xxx,
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