



Josh Harris, founder of Jupiter Communications and, later, Pseudo.com, forwarded a letter to Boing Boing today in which he proclaims to the New York Times that "Pseudo was a fake company," and that the entire enterprise was "an elaborate piece of performance art."

Why did he address this to the NYT? Mr. Harris claims many of the news articles which established a perception of legitimacy for the once high-flying internet video startup — the sort of legitimacy that helped encourage investors to part with tens of millions of dollars — were written by now-disgraced NYT writer Jayson Blair, who was forced to resign in 2003 after having been caught plagiarizing and faking content in his stories for the paper.

"I suggest you do a NYT archive search and find the four articles written by Jayson; search terms: josh harris jayson blair," says Harris.

If you're not familiar with Pseudo (and Harris') significance during the late '90s internet bubble, here are a few profile links: NY Mag, Wired, Radar, Wikipedia, BusinessWeek. His online experiment "We Live in Public" predated the era of now ubiquitous always-on lifecasting video sites.

Journalists used words like "wild, Warholian," "oddball," "dot-com playboy extraordinaire" and "golden boy" to describe Harris during the Pseudo era; also "crazy."

The man who replaced Harris as CEO at Pseudo was David Bohrman, now an executive at CNN overseeing the network's election coverage in Washington.

Harris sends this to Boing Boing from Sidamo, Ethiopia (see snapshot above, with his almost-ripe coffee plants), where he moved shortly after selling his most recent creation, Operator 11. If he looks a little under the weather, that's because, as he explains, he's been fighting a fever there for the past few weeks; he says he's there "working on a documentary about the 'Great Ethiopian Nation.'"

Here is Harris' letter, which continues after the jump:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company. I believe that the then New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was actively following my work and onto my game (taking one to know one). The last article Mr. Blair wrote about me was entitled Dot-Com Executive, Once a Conjurer of Silicon Alley Razzmatazz, Logs Off (Jayson Blair, March 4, 2001). For that interview Mr. Blair requested that we meet in the empty back room of Sardi's (the first time I recall meeting him face-to-face) and then basically winked at Andy Morris (my publicity agent) and I for over an hour. Previously Mr. Blair mentioned or quoted me in three other articles. Does the New York Times have an ethical responsibility to its readers to contact ad infinitum, ad nauseam every single source that touched Mr. Blair's writing when the integrity of its reporting is at stake? Did someone at the New York Times Corporation contact each and every person that Mr. Blair wrote about?