Fake Steve = Forbes Senior Editor

11:32 am, August 5th, 2007, Leander Kahney

Media 2004 Sneakpeek Dlyons
Pic: Forbes.

Fake Steve has been outed by (of all publications) the New York Times, and turns out he’s Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes. Here’s the story: A Mystery Solved: ‘Fake Steve’ Is an Editor

“Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Ironically, Lyons was the author of a Forbes hit piece on blogs last year, called Attack of the Blogs. It begins: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.”

Of course, libel, lies and invective is what makes Fake Steve fun, but a lot of it was aimed at his fellow journalists. It was pretty clear Fake Steve was a journalist or editor — given all the pops he made at fellow Silicon Valley scribblers. He called Gawker publisher Nick Denton a “macrocephalic sodomite” (Denton is gay and has a large head).

Now that he’s been outed, it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for him running into his targets.

UPDATE: Fake Steve has just posted his won entry about the Times story. He’s glad he was busted by the Times and not Valleywag, which has been on the hunt for months. Fake Steve writes:

“One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.”

Posted by Leander Kahney in Rumors, Web | Comment on this article

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About the author

Leander Kahney is the editor of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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