The man behind Fake Steve Jobs has bid adieu...to himself. Newsweek's Dan Lyons will cease posting to his "Real Dan Lyons" blog after he made some comments that were taken as less than favourable by their subjects.
In a recent post on the departure of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang (archived at Valleywag), Lyons wrote of Yahoo's PR team, who had told him that Yang wasn't going anywhere:
“I'd never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators - they're really an unsavoury bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of s*** 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.”
That deal, you may remember, fell apart like a wet newspaper in the mouth of a pitbull. Anyway, apparently Yahoo's PR team objected to their characterisation (we presume it was the word sacks that really got them riled), a complaint which made its way to Lyons's employers at Newsweek, prompting him to pull the blog entry.
Or, as Lyons himself described it to the AP:
"The bottom line is I don't want to jeopardize a job I like (and which feeds my hungry 3-year-old twins) over some blog that's just a funny little thing I'm doing in my spare time," Lyons wrote. "Or, to translate this into Fake Steve speak: I'm a coward and a whore who has totally sold out to The Man."
We understand Lyons's reluctance to upset his corporate overlords, but we also kind of wish he stood by his remarks, if not for himself then for everybody who's been forced to deal with...shall we say, circumlocutious PR reps.
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