Report: Newsweek orders Dan Lyons to be nice

Newsweek hired Dan Lyons because, in its own words, "In the establishment-skewering tradition of Voltaire, Cervantes and Swift, we now have a voice for our own digital age." Today, Newsweek decided that it wasn't really interested in that sort of thing, ordering Lyons to remove blog posts critical of people on his beat.

He described people at Yahoo as "lying sacks of shit," and mocked Kara Swisher for complaining about not being credited for an "exclusive" that was published moments before an official press release containing the same information.

As a result, Lyons, hired after becoming famous for exactly this sort of brutal comedy, is to quit blogging.

Here are Lyons' splendid insults:

Kara Swisher: "Kara, honey, I love you dearly, but girl-child, having a company send you a press release ten minutes before they put it on the wire isn't a scoop. That's called taking dictation."

Yahoo!: "I'd never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they're really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo's attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true "inside story" of what was going on with the Google deal ... The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever."

The situation has the whiff of old media attempting to get with the times, then exposing its fear of losing access to sources with an implosive spasm of self-moderation.

Real Dan Lyons bails on blogging [Standard via Valleywag]