Kara Swisher really did scoop the Yang story, but she still loves Dan Lyons

Jordan Golson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:39:17 -0800

Kara Swisher -- who, among her many other talents, is an excellent reporter -- broke the Jerry Yang resignation story before anyone else did. In fact, she posted her "exclusive" at 4:50pm PST, Monday -- a full ten minutes before Yahoo issued a press release at 5:00pm PST announcing the departure.

In this business, ten minutes is ten minutes -- and Swisher told me she was working on the story all weekend to get the scoop, and finally went live with it just before Yahoo issued its own press release. 40 minutes later, Kara touted her scoop as "confirmed" -- something just about any news organization would do if they were first on news of this magnitude.

It could have been worse. Swisher could have put "WORLD EXCLUSIVE XXX MUST CREDIT KARA SWISHER XXX WORLD EXCLUSIVE," just like Matt Drudge would have done. (Actually, that would have been awesome!)

After the news broke, Dan Lyons wrote a (now retracted) article slamming Yahoo PR reps as "lying sacks of shit," for allegedly misleading him about Jerry Yang's long-term status as CEO. Swisher wrote Lyons a pretend-angry email (as she is wont to do) dressing him down for not mentioning her exclusive scoop.

Dan responded to her email with a highly amusing, inside baseball-esque post poking fun at Kara:

Kara Swisher: Everybody look at me! Not at Jerry! At me! At me! At me!

I just received an angry email from Kara Swisher of AllThingsD who chides me because in my previous post about Jerry Yang stepping down at Yahoo I did not mention that Kara Swisher actually broke this story today and got an EXCLUSIVE SCOOP on the BIGGEST STORY OF THE DAY!!!!! Just for the record, here is Kara's big scoop, which she posted today at 4:50 p.m. Pacific time. And here is the official press release from Yahoo hitting Business Wire at 5 p.m. Pacific time — a whopping ten minutes later.

Sadly, Dan yanked those posts as well, but not before Kara responded in the comments with another feisty Karagram:

How would a snarktastic wonder like you know what a reporter was? I was teasing you, you twit, as you well know (I would dearly love to mangle emails you sent to me recently about your work, but I am too much of a gentleman!). When you come here, we’ll have a “talk” all right–my people like to call it a “sit-down” though. Love and kisses, Kara.

When I spoke to Swisher today, she seemed bemused at the attention being paid to Dan's posts about her: "I wasn't serious in that email. I think I called him Phyllis!" However, she was disappointed that Lyons pulled down the posts about Yahoo and her "scoop". She and I agree that Newsweek should have known what they were getting into when they hired Dan Lyons and should leave his personal blog alone. It's more interesting than most of the crap that makes it into Newsweek, that's for sure.

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Kara Swisher really did scoop the Yang story, but she still loves Dan Lyons