Steve Jobs is the leading contender for Time‘s annual Person of the Year award, even though it’s not usually awarded to someone who is no longer alive.
“The smartphone has changed the world as much as the Bible has,” said celebrity chef Mario Batali, who was pro-Jobs at Time‘s annual POY panel debate in New York.
The 2011 Person of the Year award was discussed by a panel led by NBC’s Brian Williams and Time‘s managing editor Rich Stengel. Also featured were actor Jesse Eisenberg, comedian Seth Meyers, lawyer/professor Anita Hill, senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, lobbyist Grover Norquist, and Batali.
Much of the debate was about whether Jobs should be the first person no longer alive to become Time‘s Person of the Year.
But Jesse Eisenberg, who played Marc Zuckerberg in The Social Network, said it was like the Oscars giving best director to someone who just died when they really deserved a lifetime achievement award.
Here’s some of the debate:
The panelists also suggested:
Mohamed Bouazizi — The Tunisian fruit vendor who triggered the Arab Spring
The Occupy Wall Street movement
Esraa Abdel Fatah — lead organizer of the uprising in Cairo
Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel — trying to stop the euro debt crisis
What do you guys think? The guy who started the Arab Spring (who also passed) or Jobs?
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
21 responses to “Steve Jobs Is Leading Contender For Time’s Person of Year”
How about all of them as the year of revolutionary thinkers?
For dying?
Let’s see, Walter Isaacson, Steve’s biographer…former managing editor of Time…nah, no connection.
Nice of you to take the bait, Leander, as if Isaacson needs the sales hits. So when someone else, anyone else, is named MOTY–something that used to be meaningful but hasn’t been for at least a decade–you can pretend you weren’t punked.
I think Time should break away from tradition and have both, Steve Jobs and Mohamed Bouazizi on the cover.
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agree, the person of the year, or rather the people of the year, should be ‘The Revolutionists’, starting from steve jobs and working down.
Well, Obama did get the Nobel Prize while engaging three wars. I suppose a cruel man could be ‘person of the year’ these days.
i agreed with you, it should be people of the year, in this generation we cant imagine a person of year…..
Try since Hitler was Man of the Year in 1938.
I think jobs deserve to be at least once as person of the year, if he didnt before he should be. He is more like person of the decade. But if he was before, some one else should take his place
I am always slightly surprised whenever this time of year rolls around because I also subconsciously assume that Time has died. Like Mr. Blackwell, most people think it only when it makes a noise. And POY is its noise.
Jobs is the best one there but Time’s award means nothing. Much more impressive was Forbes calling Jobs the CEO of the decade.
An award from Time in general means that you are politically left-liberal and have some celebrity.
And Batali saying that the smartphone changed the world as much as the Bible? I have an iPhone and am an atheist and even so, it’s obvious that Mario was in the cooking sherry before he went on the panel.
Steve Jobs would be my pick. It would be odd if Time named Jobs “Man of the Year” at the end of 2012! But since Jobs was alive for 9 months of the year and his impact outlasted him, I say that should satisfy the panel of judges.