Tuesday night, Esquire unpublished an article by “Prof. Jeff Jarvis,” a parody of the real journalist Jeff Jarvis.
Esquire originally published the article on April 26, later adding the editor’s note: “What follows is a piece of satire written in the voice of a satirical character” and the byline that @ProfJeffJarvis is “a well-known satirist.”
The real Jarvis, an author and professor, pointed iMediaEthis to his post on Medium, where he wrote about his disappointment. “Most people don’t spend more than 15 seconds on a web page — according to Chartbeat — and so those folks would come and see that someone named Professor Jeff Jarvis — oh, that’s my name — said these incredibly stupid things about that incredibly idiotic op-ed and they’d move on,” Jarvis wrote.
He went on, “I was appalled and upset and quickly said so on Twitter, ending up in an unsatisfactory exchange with the editor at Esquire who apparently paid for this thing.”
“It was personally upsetting. My anxiety was pushing my heart back into a fib for the first time in a few years. Oh, joy, this bozo is going to send me to the hospital. Enough,” Jarvis wrote.
The original Esquire article read in part, “Today, I’m announcing that I am joining The Innovation Party.” It went on,
“The Innovation Party will be phablet-first, and communicate only via push notifications to smartphones. The only deals it cuts will be with Apple and Google, not with special interests. We will integrate natively with iOS and Android, and spread the message using emojis and GIFs, rather than the earth-killing longform print mailers of yesteryear. This will give us direct access to netizens, so we can be more responsive than any political party in history.”
A link to the article now goes to an error page. According to Capital New York’s Peter Sterne, “The faux op-ed — an archived version of which can be read here — was written in the voice of ‘Prof Jeff Jarvis,’ a satirical Twitter character created by Bradbury who parodies techno-utopian media visionaries. The character’s name is a reference to CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.”
The article was deleted around 9 p.m., Capital New York reported.
Jarvis also tweeted
Jarvis told iMediaEthics he didn’t plan to actually hire an attorney over the matter.
In February, Al Jazeera America unpublished a satire article by the satire Prof. Jeff Jarvis account that listed the news organization as one of “six hot media startups to watch in 2016.” This was especially awkward since Al Jazeera America was closed this month for financial reasons, as iMediaEthics reported at the time.
iMediaEthics has e-mailed Esquire and direct messaged @ProfJeffJarvis for more information.
Hat Tip: Luis Gomez