Erstellt am: 10. 11. 2009 - 12:42 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Why Mainstream Media is Dying
Dan Lyons
This is all just so much fun. The Fake Steve Jobs is someone I am sure you have heard of. It was a rather entertaining parody of the Real Steve Jobs providing the author a platform to skewer all sorts of wonderful things.
Bloggers and Mainstream journalists alike were anxious to uncover who was behind the blog, with more than a few secretly hoping it was the mighty Mr. Bill himself.
It wasn't.
It was Dan Lyons. A Forbes editor and tech journalist. One of those journalists who took up arms against the online upstarts and wrangled a Forbes cover story titled "Attack of the Blogs". It's opener was a full on battle cry, one that we are still hearing today:
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
He also covered the whole SCO fiasco, and ended up being completely and utterly wrong. Something he documents quite well on his personal blog and wrote about in a follow up article on Forbes.
I particularly liked this one:
After Fake Steve was outed, Dan announced he would be continuing to blog under his own name. The most recent post on that site is from May 2009.
Fake Steve on the other hand is still going strong, and has allowed his author to make a pretty complete turnaround. In a post on Sunday he took on the mainstream media with a provocatively titled post, Why the Mainstream Media is Dying. Dan can do invective well, and he uses the story of Zynga, and it's coverage at TechCrunch and the NYT to illustrate just why "Quality Journalism" frequently isn't.
You see, while TechCrunch had been busy exposing questionable practices at Zynga, documenting the CEO of Zynga explaining the advantages of being scummy and just generally raising a ruckus, the New York Times were busy putting together an article about the Facebook gaming business, including Zynga, and making it all sound like quite the wonderful thing.
Dan (or was it really supposed to be Fake Steve this time?) let loose. The post is extremely entertaining, and doubly amazing considering it came from someone who had been on the other side of the fence in 2005.
Unfortunately he missed one important detail.
Being the upstanding kind of guy that he is Steve (or was it Dan this time, it seemed more like Dan than Steve) posted a correction.
It too was entertaining.
Whatever you do, don't skip the comments. Unlike many broader, mainstream media sites, comments on focused blogs can actually provide a high quality addition to the posted content, and frequently do quite a bit toward rounding out and expanding the story.