Forbes magazine journalist Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, has given an entertaining keynote here on the last day of Web 2.0. I think – although I may have missed someone – that he’s the only big media staffer to be given time on a stage during the event.
What he writes on his blog becomes, of course, great keynote fodder; geek humour, plenty of visual gags to keep the crowd entertained. And, by God, Steve Jobs is rich raw material.
Of interest to me is that Lyons’ story is also a cautionary tale for big (old) media’s digital departments who might be tempted to ignore colleagues in print. I hadn’t known that Forbes Digital knocked him back several times for a job, even just a blog, before he kicked off his site. Even if they’d said yes, it doesn’t sound a lot like they’d have let him adopt the controversial persona he adopted for his Blogger.com site, initially written anonymously.
The games he played before being stripped of that anonymity isn’t a tale that Forbes Digital bosses will enjoy hearing played back. Having been rejected, again, by his magazine’s digital arm, he emailed a boss at Forbes as Fake Steve to ask if he’d be interested in taking him on. The Forbes boss, not knowing he was emailing someone who was already an employee on the old print side, sent back a fawning email saying, in essence, “yes”. In the meantime, Forbes Publisher Richard Karlgaard joined in the chase to unmask Fake Steve, all the while also emailing over storyline ideas for Fake Steve.
Lyons makes them all sound like utter halfwits. He refers to Forbes a couple of times in the keynote while flicking wanker gestures over his shoulder. His corporate paymasters must have a strong sense of humour.
Beyond the gags and clear conversion to the blogging world, Lyons retains a very traditional media perspective. In a slightly half-baked way towards the end of his talk, he offers up that big media is really starting to get the web, and presents as slightly inevitable that – now they’ve grasped what’s going on – they’ll come to dominate it.
Maybe, he offers as consolation to this crowd, some blog publishers will become big media too, by implication suggesting that will be the web world’s contribution to the media landscape.
It’s an odd message to come now, at the end of a conference where big media has been almost entirely absent, where all the energy and thinking about how content evolves is coming from technology companies, not journalists or traditional media. Unless Yahoo counts as traditional media, which has been suggested…
That portion of his keynote is greeted with silence. I don’t think many here really believe him.
