Fake Steve Jobs Blog Likely To Shut Down
It took a year for anyone to figure out that Forbes (now Newsweek) writer Dan Lyons was the guy behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog. Now, a couple of years later, the blog is still going strong. And it remains very, very funny.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dan Lyons has been running the Fake Steve Jobs persona at full volume since being unmasked in mid-2007 after a year of anonymity — a hunt TechCrunch folded into its broader coverage of the fake-blogger wave that season. Since then the character has crossed over into the offline world, most visibly when Lyons brought the persona on stage at Web 2.0 Expo in April 2008.
What changes now is Lyons' day job: he has moved from Forbes to Newsweek, and TechCrunch reports — explicitly as a rumor, not confirmed — that the blog is likely to shut down. If true, it would end one of the longest-running executive-satire properties of the blog era while its author's mainstream platform grows.
First-order effects
- Lyons' satirical outlet and his Newsweek byline would be consolidated under one roof, ending the split between pseudonymous blogger and named magazine writer.
Second-order effects
- The imitator personas that sprang up during the 2007 fake-blog wave would lose their template's most durable example, raising the bar question for whether any single-author parody blog can outlive its creator's novelty.
Third-order effects
- If the shutdown holds, it marks the absorption of blog-era persona writing into legacy mastheads — satire talent hired for its audience rather than kept outside the newsroom.
The trend: The anonymous-parody blog boom of 2007 is consolidating as its star authors take salaried mainstream positions, trading pseudonyms for masthead reach.