It’s not “because of” a grumpy unsubscribe, but despite it.
Probably the Most Thorough Interview I’ve been subjected to happened in mid-June. It took journalist Simon Owens (who writes with great insight about the “Creator Economy”) until today to distill his notes down …to only 4,000 words! He was boggled that True was able to start, let alone survive, in the ancient days of the Internet, when there were no tools to do what I’ve been doing since 1994.
An academic’s “history” of “Florida Man” makes some startling — and completely wrong! — claims about how the “Florida Man meme” got started online. No, it wasn’t in 2012, or even the “mid-2000s”!
True recently hit its 25th anniversary. But can a weird news story that I posted at NASA before This is True was “invented” be traced? This weekend I decided to find out, since it’s a pretty “famous” story considering it never ran in the newsletter.
On Monday, the Youtube channel “TopTenz” listed what it thinks are the “top 10” sites online that give out humorous “awards” — here’s the video:
What Would You Include as significant milestones in the “history” of weird news?
I’ve heard from several friends who spotted me in the Wall Street Journal today. It was just a tiny mention in an article about the Dvorak keyboard, an ergonomic alternative to the common “Qwerty” layout that you probably use.
If you made it to this page after reading about This is True in Playboy, you’ve at least proven that you do read the articles! This is True is the thinking person’s humor publication, just as Playboy might be considered the thinking person’s men’s magazine. I humbly believe Playboy agrees, since This is True and/or I have now been featured in their pages four five six times (no pictures, thankfully).
I had an interesting experience on Wednesday: I got a phone call from the producer of G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, asking if I could be on their show — in five minutes.
This is the favorite interview I’ve ever done, for a now-defunct pop-culture magazine. To keep it available, the author gave me permission to post it here. -rc
The 11 December issue was reruns from 1995 since I was down with the flu. One of those stories was this one (which dealt with trying to embarrass journalists into better writing so there aren’t so many errors in the paper). It was only the second “rerun column” ever in 11-1/2 years of weekly True issues.
Long-time readers (read: most of you) know “zero tolerance” is one of my pet peeves: my ZT page has a lot background on the concept, with several follow-up pages linked from the bottom.
“You’ve caused a notable effect on cultural consciousness.” — that’s what one of True’s readers said, one of hundreds and hundreds of you who wrote to say that Mike Peters’ popular Mother Goose & Grimm comic strip featured a “Get Out of Hell Free” card.
Today’s mail brought a copy of the third edition of a college textbook, Computers in Your Future. It has a brief case study on one new trend enabled by the Internet: email publishing, using This is True as its example.
It isn’t often that someone featured in a This is True story writes to complain or argue about a story about them. The few that have written with comments are indeed generally not at all upset, but rather quite amused by the whole thing. So much so that I wish I got more such notes.
The Online Journalism Review (published by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication) did an interesting story on “Value-added email: A Publishing Alternative to the WWW”.
The April issue of Wired magazine f-i-n-a-l-l-y takes notice of email publishing — after I’ve been doing it for nearly four years!
The folks at CNN caught the personality piece in the Los Angeles Times and called to see if I’d go on the air: the CNN Morning News, with emphasis on the morning part.
After the New York Times did a nice write-up on me and True, I sent a copy to a Los Angeles Times reporter so he could see how the out-of-town paper scooped a great story right in his own back yard.
Just over a year old, This is True is written up extremely favorably in the New York Times — in the business section. Their reporter is the first one to really understand the implications of my for-profit email publishing idea.