Tech blogger leaves publication after misrepresenting himself

An InfoWorld blogger, Randall Kennedy,  has left the publication after it was discovered that he had misrepresented himself as an executive for a software company to get interviews, writes Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal.

Wingfield reports, “On Sunday, InfoWorld’s editor in chief Eric Knorr published a blog post saying that Kennedy was no longer with the publication after InfoWorld discovered Kennedy was using the pseudonym Craig Barth, chief technology officer of Devil Mountain Software, in interviews with other media for stories about Microsoft software. Another technology news site, ZDNet, on Sunday posted the results of a lengthy investigation into the connection between Kennedy and Barth after Knorr blogged about Kennedy’s departure.

“In a phone conversation, Kennedy admitted that he posed as Craig Barth in media interviews, even though no such person exists at Devil Mountain Software, a real company that makes software for analyzing the performance of Windows PCs. Kennedy is a principle of Devil Mountain Software, a fact that Kennedy and InfoWorld’s Knorr say was disclosed to InfoWorld readers. Kennedy says he misrepresented himself as Craig Barth to create a new persona that would be more credible with media than he would be under his real name.

“As an InfoWorld contributor, Kennedy says he staked out controversial, sensationalistic positions on technology topics that he tried to distance himself from as Barth. ‘My role at InfoWorld was shock jock,’ he said in an interview from Mauritius, the island nation in the Indian Ocean where he says he lives most of the year. ‘This was the best solution I could come up with.'”

Read more here.