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If I had my way, the public would have left Fake Steve alone. He provided a world of entertainment at the low, low price of anonymity. However, this is the Internet and thus it was only a matter of time before someone rummaged through enough of his trash to find out who he really was.

This week marked the end of an era, Fake Steve Jobs has been outed as a senior editor at Forbes, Daniel Lyons. Daniel is most well known as the author of the story, “Attack of The Blogs”, where he argues that anonymous bloggers can attack companies without fear of repercussions. The obvious ironies aside, I think this fiasco raises a few much larger questions about the relationship between Mainstream Media and Blogging.

New York Times

Question: “Should Fake Steve Jobs have been outed using the investigative acumen of a paper like the New York Times?”

Few things make me more upset than wasted resources, in this case a journalist (Brad Stone) who could have devoted his attention to any one of a thousand important tech issues instead decided to focus instead on putting together a tabloid piece. Not only did he ruin the fun of thousands of Fake Steve’s readers, he proved once again that major media publications seem to only be capable of dealing with tech on the most superficial of levels.

Brad’s little investigation reads a lot like a school yard bully who, feeling a bit insecure, decides to walk into a playground and show all the little children how “clever” he is. If you aren’t sure, in this case, we are playing the little children. The problem is not with the substance of the story, it is with the fact that it is not a story. At least not of the stripe that the New York Times of all places should be reporting on.

Mainstream Media calls bloggers hacks who can’t find a scoop. This is, in many ways, true. However, what they don’t mention is that generally we don’t have the enormous investigative resources of media houses like NYT and for what we have, we don’t do a bad job.

They also lambast us for focusing on non-issues, but tell me what is less important to the public at large than the identity of a web personality that is barely known outside of Techmeme. This is the sort of story that we expect from Valleywag, nothing against Nick but lets face it — it is. Institutional Journalism is supposed to be about reporting the news of the day, not firing one over the bow of the blogosphere.

I don’t care how cute it might have seemed to uncover Fake Steve’s ID, nor do I care that Dan Lyons isn’t exactly a sterling example of a blogging evangelist. What I do care about is that the New York Times should be above this sort of piddling self-indulgence, and if they choose not to be at the very least they should get off of their journalistic high horses.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Should we care that Fake Steve has been uncovered? Probably not. Blogging anonymously isn’t a concept that scales, and I am sure Dan knew that much. What we should be concerned about is whether the state of Technology Journalism is so sorry that this is what passes for news. Come now, I congratulate you on raises the heckles of the ’sphere Brad but you can do better than this.

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