His writings for Newsweek have been fairly uninspired. Especially compared to his skewering of the cultures at IBM and Yahoo as FSJ, most of his columns felt far too "safe". Not that I can criticize someone for dumping blogging to move to a well paid magazine gig, but it seemed crazy for Newsweek to hire someone like Lyons and then force him to write from a straitjacket.
The first few return posts have totally recaptured the voice, so hopefully FSJ finally has an outlet where he can write without tainting the Newsweek "brand".
I really enjoyed reading Fake Steve way back in the day (which was, what? 1 year or so ago?) - but once he started blogging as other Jerry Yang, Schmidt, etc it the whole thing went down hill rapidly.
Revealing his real identity and effectively shutting down the Fake Steve blog didn't help matters.
Just for the record, the first two return posts were posted before the WSJ story broke. Both the post about heaven and the one that clearly refers to harvesting body parts (and the first comment made it crystal clear). Make of that what you will.
I never thought Fake Steve Jobs was that good. Among other details, I refuse to believe that Steve Jobs' reaction to the backdating "scandal" would be anything other than annoyance at how his time and attention was wasted on it, but FSJ worked it up to be this huge melodramatic depressive period.
But whatever fun there was in the blog was ruined when it turned out this guy was just another business journalist. Then it suddenly clicked that he couldn't get into Steve's head well enough to pull off the character. After that revelation, the flaws in his characterization became even more apparent--ah, that's why Fake Steve Jobs is commenting vividly on things that are fascinating to tech industry journalists but probably beneath the real Steve Jobs' notice.
Then it suddenly clicked that he couldn't get into Steve's head well enough to pull off the character
So, wait. When you were judging the writing based on the writing, you thought one thing. When you were judging it based on the guy doing the writing, you, uh, figured out that the writing was worse than you thought before you acquired some extraneous information?
FSJ was never supposed to be about what Steve Jobs would actually think about. It was always poking fun at what people said about Jobs -- and since the most prominent people saying things about Jobs are tech journalists, it's fine for a tech journalist to write it.
It's more that FSJ pretty badly mischaracterized Steve, but the flaws were easier to shrug off when I couldn't easily pin down why in particular he was mischaracterized that particular way.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/15/steve-...
Although, he did hint he would be back after Steve's recovery in this ARS interview:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/07/the-real-dan-lyons...
The first few return posts have totally recaptured the voice, so hopefully FSJ finally has an outlet where he can write without tainting the Newsweek "brand".
Revealing his real identity and effectively shutting down the Fake Steve blog didn't help matters.
I doubt the old flame will be re-ignited here.
But whatever fun there was in the blog was ruined when it turned out this guy was just another business journalist. Then it suddenly clicked that he couldn't get into Steve's head well enough to pull off the character. After that revelation, the flaws in his characterization became even more apparent--ah, that's why Fake Steve Jobs is commenting vividly on things that are fascinating to tech industry journalists but probably beneath the real Steve Jobs' notice.
So, wait. When you were judging the writing based on the writing, you thought one thing. When you were judging it based on the guy doing the writing, you, uh, figured out that the writing was worse than you thought before you acquired some extraneous information?
FSJ was never supposed to be about what Steve Jobs would actually think about. It was always poking fun at what people said about Jobs -- and since the most prominent people saying things about Jobs are tech journalists, it's fine for a tech journalist to write it.