Here's The Real Story Behind Apple, Newsweek, Dan Lyons, And Steven Levy
Earlier today, we covered a flare up between Steven Levy of Wired and Dan Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, tech columnist at Newsweek. — Over the weekend, Dan had appeared on CNN and said that Apple's head of PR …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dan Lyons has spent three years turning his Fake Steve Jobs persona into a platform for needling both Silicon Valley and the press that covers it — a run that included being banned from CNBC in 2009 and, just a week before this piece, reports that the Fake Steve Jobs blog was likely to shut down. His weekend CNN appearance, where he criticized Apple's head of PR over the company's media handling, is the persona's author now attacking on camera under his own name at Newsweek.
The twist is who got caught in the middle: Steven Levy of Wired, whose own reporting on Apple made him collateral damage in the exchange, prompting SAI to lay out what it sees as the real sequence of events behind the flare-up.
First-order effects
- Apple's famously tight PR operation is now being publicly challenged on a national cable network by a sitting Newsweek columnist, putting its media-access policies under scrutiny at the height of iPad launch coverage.
- Steven Levy and Wired are pulled into a public dispute they did not start, forcing both to respond to a story about journalism rather than one reported by them.
Second-order effects
- Other tech journalists covering Apple face the access-versus-criticism tradeoff in the open: Lyons's on-air attack makes clear that going after Apple's PR carries a professional cost that some in the press will now weigh explicitly.
- With Apple simultaneously managing iPad Wi-Fi complaints and crippled iWork apps in the same news cycle, the company's message-control strategy is being tested from product and press angles at once.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pseudonymous tech satire collapsing into named, adversarial commentary blurs the line between columnist and source-baiter, pushing outlets like Newsweek and Wired toward explicit rules about how their writers may attack companies they also cover.
The trend: Tech journalism's adversarial relationship with Apple's message control is hardening into open conflict as the iPad launch turns every PR decision into a public test case.