Not Necessarily the New York Times

June 29, 2015 12:22 AM

The Romenesko journalism blog has become aware of some links to nytimes.com.co for some - interesting - stories that are currently getting Facebook 'link juice', including:
WI Gov. Scott Walker Challenges Supreme Court Justices to Fist Fight
Marcus Bachmann Files For Divorce, Fresh on Heels of SCOTUS Ruling
Kanye West Calls Brown v. Board Of Education ‘Best Supreme Court Decision Of All Time’
The unlabeled parody stories are re-postings of material from the equally unlabeled parody site National Report, with over 300 stories going back four months.
Previously, the Newspaper of Record had only taken 36 hours to C&D nytimes.cat

NationalReport.net previously on Metafilter: 1, 2, 3 (links since deleted; after stories about it like this, it's no surprise they're working with other URLs)

posted by oneswellfoop (15 comments total)

I'm not really all that impressed by the satire. The Bachmann stuff is especially something I could do without. Aside from screwing around with getting people to take it seriously with the Times url, there just aren't that many lols here. It's not quite hitting Onion or Adequacy standards.

Okay, one lol at, "Pope Francis Removes Confederate Flag From Vatican." In fact, I just gave it what I have learned is known as "Facebook link Juice."
posted by Drinky Die at 12:31 AM on June 29, 2015

If the satire was any good, they'd not need to trick people into looking at it. I suggest this isn't satire so much as trolling.
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:50 AM on June 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, that's why I went with the Adequacy comparison. Even trolling can be good in the right hands.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:51 AM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Over on livejournal, three quarters of the Scopes posts are from "news satire" sites like this. It's sad, really.
posted by happyroach at 1:29 AM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I honestly must confess that I thought twice, three times, 35-38 times about posting this... Best of the Web? No way. Something worth knowing about? Yeah, I hope so, especially when I discovered that a couple of NationalReport.net hoaxes had previously gotten into Mefi comments (but not FPPs).

It just seemed especially interesting that nytimes.com.co, which had remained mostly unnoticed for months, had hit paydirt after the SCOTUS Marriage Decision with a flurry of 'reaction' stories (and since the decision came down on Friday, it got a whole weekend of notoriety while the NYT Legal Staff was out of the office). The Legal Beagles are due to begin their Monday Mornings in a few hours, and we'll see how quickly they can C&D... and how slowly the 'satirists' can respond.

I once considered getting into the "fake news" business myself... I even came up with what I considered the perfect name for a site competing with The Onion. (At least much less misleading than 'National Report')
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:57 AM on June 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

As I've noted a bunch of times in reference to these would-be Onion imitators, there is definitely an art to fake news. I think the key thing is to come up with a headline that is simultaneously absurd and unbelievable, yet in some way still truthful about the issues and participants therein. Most of these "satire" wannabe sites just make up an untrue yet vaguely plausible headline and call it a day; There's literally no craft there other than trying to fool the credulous. The Onion isn't great satire because it's factually incorrect, it's great satire because it gets to the heart of current events through precisely-targeted exaggeration.
posted by Strange Interlude at 4:47 AM on June 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

Obligatory hey-yo: it's been so long since I've considered the NYT particularly reliable aside from Krugman's blog and the occasional Sunday magazine piece that Poe's Law goes into effect with things like this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:55 AM on June 29, 2015

... for a bunch of trolling, it's pretty well executed. I wonder if it makes them money.
posted by ph00dz at 6:41 AM on June 29, 2015

I think the key thing is to come up with a headline that is simultaneously absurd and unbelievable, yet in some way still truthful about the issues and participants therein

The challenge for even the Onion is that all too often, people take it seriously.
posted by adamrice at 7:07 AM on June 29, 2015

Is the domain com.co?

You can thank Colombia for this and other third-level domains.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:53 AM on June 29, 2015

The challenge for even the Onion is that all too often, people take it seriously.

There's no good way to control for people not possessed of a sense of irony. Maybe if they made an "easier" version of the Onion for everyone's middle-aged and elderly relatives?
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:37 PM on June 29, 2015

Oh wait, that's Fox News. And they still think it's real.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:38 PM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Tanned. Rested. Ready. Jindal 2016" was pretty funny.

I mean it's a joke right?
posted by sidereal at 2:44 PM on June 29, 2015

NationalReport.net's attitude toward "fooling people" came out a few months ago when Facebook announced it was developing a "satire tag". Sounds like the most serious thing the site THINKS it's ever posted.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:45 PM on June 29, 2015

Semi-Related: Westboro Baptist to picket Weird Al in Kansas City. Press release even dumps on Al's late parents. Parody is easy - humanity is hard.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:26 PM on June 29, 2015