From The Atlantic:
Despite the challenges posed by the fickle media landscape, WWN has preserved its distinct editorial tone—a synthesis of comedy, hard news, and old maid’s tales. McGinness is loathe to categorize the paper at all, saying that despite the ludicrous front-page stories (“Severed Leg Hops to Hospital” came to mind), it’s not comedy. Nor does it skew very serious. “We publish news of suspect credibility,” he says. There are three three types of WWN reader, according to the editor—those who believe, those who don’t believe, and “those who want to believe but aren’t sure.”
As I couldn’t help but add in the comments, I was Ed Anger for about 18 months, during 2009-10.
I wrote a new one every morning, Monday to Friday. Even for me, it was harder than it sounds.
I was kind of relieved when I got the inevitable “We’re going in a different direction…” email.
They still have my St. Patrick’s Day one up, and just change the date every year.
Here’s one of mine, from February 2010:
I’m madder than a hippie with a busted hookah!
Every single day, I read a new story on the computer machine about how this global warming thing was just a scam from day one!
Now it turns out the WWF had something to do with all this baloney. I always knew TV wrestling was phony, but this is ridiculous!
How did a bunch of egghead pointdexters get fooled by what Hulk Hogan thinks about panda bears?
This is worst than last week, when the global warming guys’ “scientific research” turned out to be an article from an old Readers Digest they stole out of the dentist’s office.
It’s like I keep telling you people: these so-called scientists are no smarter than you and me. Some of them are even dumber! Turns out one of the big shot scientists is some weird looking old Indian guy who writes dirty books.
It’s true. And by Indian I don’t mean a real Indian like we have here, with their tomahawks and casinos and so forth. I mean one of those foreigner Indians who eat smelly food and pray to the statues with the fifty arms.
This Indian guy whose been telling us the world is going to explode turns out to be writing porno this whole time. The only “warming” is in this guy’s pants – or whatever it is those people wear.
He needs to go back to snake charming or running the 7/11 or working at the call center, and leave the science stuff to Jesse Ventura! At least he’s a red, white and blue blooded American and not some slimy foreign pervert! Hasn’t this outsourcing stuff gone far enough?
