The Onion should be familiar to just about anyone surfing the internet. Since it’s launched it’s become a favorite parody site for our real news
The Onion: Our Front Pages
headlines. So integrated into pop culture, even real news outlets have been duped enough to report Onion articles as real news. Their writers are witty, intelligent, and funny, creating a dangerous combination to write snarky articles that are a mirror to the world that we so rarely get to see.
To celebrate their success, and what they call their “crackerjack reporting”, The Onion is releasing The Onion: Our Front Pages ($19). The book
will house some of the best headlines to include “Clever bumper Stickers Resolve Abortion Issue” and “Last Literate Person On Earth Is Dead At 98.” Over the years they’ve done amazing work in making us see things for what they really are, and getting under the skin of topics that some companies and higher ups would rather people just forget. But that’s not how The Onion operates.
The book will take a look back at this Wisconsin-based company’s humble beginnings and their climb into pop culture icon. With over 300 pages of witty humor and outrageous articles, there’s plenty of humor to keep you busily flipping the pages.
- Image by Gnal via Flickr
I worked as a journalist through college, and some after I graduated, and even today I am still producing content for both online and offline projects. As such, nothing infuriates me more then bad journalism, and lack of fact checking. Now before I get blasted, yes I’ve made mistakes, but nothing on the scale of the U.S. economy.
Over the weekend, TechCrunch along with several other media sites, pointed out an incident with The Times reporting a story on Yahoo’s possible bedding of Microsoft with their search technology. For those of us with keen eyes in the industry, the story was missing something, something we just couldn’t put our finger on…perhaps facts. TechCrunch tore the article apart by negating the supposed “facts” of the story and left the article with no leg to stand on. The key to this was that the markets were not open, otherwise a reputable paper printing material like that would have surely made an impact.
Now today, another story comes out announcing another Yahoo buyout story, this time regarding two AOL mavericks, Johnathon Miller and Ross Levinsohn. The article was bogus, the story unconfirmed, later confirmed that while the two were indeed raising money, and while they were having chat with Microsoft and Yahoo, there was no intent to purchase. This time the Wall Street Journal took the brunt of the backlash, and this time people did lose money. Stock for Yahoo jumped 11.7% which resulted in a lot of unhappy people.
This reminds me of a Twitter statement @1938media made regarding those that relied on social media as the “source” for information. “Dopes!” I believe was the word he used. Personally, I don’t know where the story came from, but where was the fact checking? In the rush to be the first to be in-the-know, a lot of people were effected by this financially. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to check facts and sources, and not always rely on the quick and easy. People need to use their own heads and thinks things through, interpret the information and make sound judgement.
You can read the entire TechCrunch article HERE.
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