Media Reaction to This is True

Items are shown starting with the oldest. When a publication is listed more than once, it means there was more than one article. If you have seen an article not listed here, please let me know!

• “A tasty weekly collection.” —Net-Letter Guide
• “Two minutes after I subscribed… I was reading the current issue and chuckling.” —The Detroit News
• “All the News That’s Not Fit to Print.” —Newsweek
• “The kind of news items that keep comedians and commentators in business.” —Washington Post
• “Best in Net Entertainment: Every week, Randy Cassingham rounds up the strangest news events he can find; from bumbled bank robberies around the world to humorously bad decisions on the part of the world’s leaders, politicians, and CEOs. He then throws in a line or two of hysterically funny, ironic commentary and mails the whole thing to thousands of his closest friends around the world.” —Internet World
• “One of the most popular columns on the Internet.” —QST
• “The connoisseur’s cornucopia of oddness.” —.net magazine (UK)
• “Filled with interesting off-beat news stories.” —United Press International
• “How did he get so popular so fast? Well, for one thing, he writes funny stuff.” —New York Times

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  “And now for something completely different.” —CNN Morning News

• “One of our favorite [online features]. If you like what you read, buy the book.” —Internet World
• “Cassingham believes he has the best of both worlds. He gets to report on stories but can add his own twist.” —American Bookseller
• “This is True by Randy Cassingham is a digest of world news with a difference. Randy scours the media for interesting snippets, rewrites them and turns out a neat weekly column.” —New Straits Times (Malaysia)
• “The truth sometimes hurts, but when it crosses the line to downright funny, that’s when Randy Cassingham swings into action.” —Boardwatch
• “Cassingham is a humorist for the Information Age, an Internet-savvy satirist and social commentator. The Jay Leno of Cyberspace.” —Los Angeles Times
• “If you’re fascinated by whimsical news stories, then you’ll definitely want to subscribe to Randy Cassingham’s weekly syndicated Internet column, ‘This is True’. You’ll soon be swimming in odd little tidbits guaranteed to make you the hit of the water-cooler circuit.” —The Davis (Calif.) Enterprise
• “If you enjoy irony and have a good sense of whimsy, you’ll love it!” —Computer Currents
• “The [David] Letterman of the ‘net.” —MediaTelevision (CityTV Toronto)
• “If you can’t make it home to watch the weird perversions of society on the Sally Jesse Oprah Geraldo Povich show… try This is True.” —The Whole Internet Calendar

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  “One of the most popular Internet sites in the world.” —KEX-AM (Portland, OR)

• “Written with dry humor.” —Nihon Keizai Shimbun (The “Nikkei” — translated from Japanese)
• “For those Sunday mornings when the house is quiet and there’s time to sip a cup of coffee, treat yourself to This is True.” —Computer Shopper
• “Since 1994, ‘This is True’ has been practicing what The Web of Culture has been preaching. This weekly newspaper column not only features wild, very funny and TRUE newspaper stories from all over the world, it is READ all over the world. We at The Web of Culture love it.” —The Web of Culture
• “A great resource for those looking for [sermon] illustrations.” —Internet for Christians Newsletter
• “Quirky stories… punctuated by Cassingham’s humorous tag lines.” —Editor & Publisher
• “In a reversal of the current trend, he broke into print — and profit using his on-line popularity as a springboard.” —Denver Post
• “Randy Cassingham [is] a journalist famous for his long-running newsletter This is True.” —London Guardian
• “Each week Randy Cassingham searches the news for the strange, the bizarre, and the just plain funny events that have taken place around the world. …We subscribe to several mailing lists here, but ‘This is True’ is always a ‘must read!'” —News@SYIX
• “Plucks headlines and stories from the nation’s newspapers and wryly comments on them.” —Entrepreneur

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  “Truth is stranger than fiction and sometimes it’s funnier too.” —Washington Post

• “Inspired: ‘This is True’ author Randy Cassingham. Mired: Grizzled conspiracy fan Pierre Salinger.” —Wall Street Journal, “The Year on the Net”
• “Randy Cassingham is a gutsy writer. He was offered a syndication contract for his column This is True from one of the largest newspaper syndicates on the planet, the Creators Syndicate (the folks who carry Ann Landers and Johnny Hart to a worldwide audience). He turned the contract down and has never looked back.” —HumourNet
• “Cassingham has spent considerable time and money boosting his mailing list security.” —Information Week
• “For years, Cassingham has been searching the papers for amazing but true news stories or headlines, to which he attaches a witty, funny or borderline-sarcastic tagline. It’s nearly impossible to read these and not laugh out loud.” —Philadelphia Daily News
• “Delights thousands of subscribers every week.” —$ales Doctors
• “A brilliant example.” —Computer Source Magazine
• Hot Site: “Randy Cassingham has a passion for the truth. And you’ll never believe the stuff he’s dug up…. Truly stranger than fiction.” —USA Today
• “Author Randy Cassingham culls the odd and eerie events of the day and publishes them, along with his own sardonic comment.” —Netsurfer Digest
• “With so many rumours doing the rounds on the Net, it’s often hard to sort the fact from the fiction. Randy Cassingham has made it his mission in life to bring unusual stories to the attention of a Net-using audience.” —London Daily Telegraph
• “This is True is one of the biggest lists on the Net…. It’s [sic] popularity comes from Cassingham’s shrewd selection of subject matter.” —Wired
• “Randy Cassingham is an example of why you don’t need a syndicate to have a successful career as a national columnist. He used the Internet to promote himself instead, even turning down an offer from a U.S. national syndicator to run his quirky weekly news column called ‘This Is True.’ … This columnist’s business model is one that even syndicated writers might envy.” —Editor & Publisher
• “Most folks are afraid to tell it like it is. Regardless, the truth will set you free. Enter This is True.” —Fierce
• “I highly suggest you subscribe to This Is True by Randy Cassingham. It’s a weekly mailing that covers all the really stupid things people have done in the past week. It also includes a funny headline. He references all his work (and is a stickler for accuracy). This email is the highlight of my inbox. Seriously, check him out. There is a free version and a paid version. The paid version has more stories in it and you get other offers. I’ll never go back to the free edition.” —BYU’s 100 Hour Board
• “Guaranteed astonishment!” —Monde (translated from French)
• “This is True came into being in 1994 when Cassingham, a journalist by profession, began clipping funny and bizarre items from newspapers, adding editorial comments and then posting them on the employee bulletin board at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where he worked. It became an intra-office hit.” —Rocky Mountain News
• “The column consists of several rewritten recent news stories that comes with his droll remarks added in just a few words. God, these stories are so interesting that really, they need no decoration entirely!” —Chinabyte (translated from Chinese)
• Incredibly strange but true stories. One anecdote won’t be enough.” —WKBW-TV (Buffalo, NY)
• “This e-mail-zine does everything so well and is entertaining enough that I’d like to give it a six. [But] if I did I’d have to spend an hour or two making a new award graphic. So if Randy’s ok with it, I hope the five works well enough. Score (scale of 1-5): 5+” —Todd Kuipers’ Open Road

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  A “wildly popular email newsletter.” —The Emailian

• “Very professionally done…. and an inexpensive paid version has even more fun oddities.” —Microtimes
• “News You Can Use: ‘This is True’, Randy Cassingham’s famous collection of offbeat news stories.” —PC Computing, “Amazing FREE Stuff!” issue
• “Success was immediate — subscribers were so many that in two years time Randy was able to leave his job and dedicate his full time to ‘This is True’. He moved to Boulder, Co. and there he writes his weekly column, sending it to half the World.” —Informazione (translated from Italian)
• “Well worth a visit.” —London Guardian (UK)
• “While weird news bloggers come and go, Cassingham’s website has been up and running since 1994.” —About.com , December 2007
• “Not only are his newsletters fun and free, they’re delivered only once a week. This means that signing up does not translate into becoming overloaded with tons of e-mails you don’t have time to read.” —Summit (County, Colorado) Daily News
• “A compilation of weird news, accompanied by acerbic and often hilarious commentary. Randy skims about 500 newspaper articles per day, and distills from them summaries of the strangest news stories — the ones that make you turn your head and say, ‘They did what?” —Contentious
• “Exactly the kind of random, barely-relevant, yet vaguely unnerving item[s] The Finger appreciates.” —The Finger
• “On paper, Randy Cassingham has what many journalists would consider a dream job…. He has no boss, writes whatever he wants and earns a profit. But newsprint toilers beware: it’s not that easy.” —Online Journalism Review
• “Randy is a founding father of Internet humor, which wouldn’t mean a thing if ‘This is True’ wasn’t reliably funny. It is.” —Jim Rosenberg’s Monologue
• “This is True finds strange but true news stories, which would be great enough. But …Randy Cassingham adds the coup de grace — a witty line that completes each story in precisely the way a news reporter wouldn’t dare.” —Dummies Daily, “The Web After Five”
• “Weird News Web Sites: *** (Three stars — Best)” —Infoseek
• “Consistently good humor is hard to find — on the net or anywhere else. Here’s a good one.” —Internet Tourbus
• Hot Site: “May convince you that the nation’s capital isn’t the only place where strange things happen. This is True even adds some zinger commentaries to outlandish real-life stories.” —USA Today
• “Get paid to be funny! Boulder writer Randy Cassingham does, e-mailing a weekly humor column to subscribers and newspapers around the world.” —Rocky Mountain News, “100 Great Colorado Web Sites”
• “Randy Cassingham recounts tales of hapless criminals, outrageous lawsuits and tortured logic.” —American Journalism Review
• “A delightful assortment of oddball news items and humorous commentary.” —American Medical News
• “This Is True — more true, though preposterous, stories of the unpredictable doings of human beings.” —This Week: the Best Information on the Net
• “Bored with all of those silly, untrue nightmare stories that people pass around like the flu over e-mail? Then check out ‘This is True’.” —Celluloid Jungle
• “Syndicated columnist Randy Cassingham’s weekly weird news is not fabricated. His commentary is.” —MiningCo.com
• “THIS is TRUE is so popular that the author is able to sell books of past issues.” —I Hate Computers
• “There are so many made-up stories on the Net, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not. My site of the night, ‘This is True’ gives you Weird but True stories that have been collected and verified from all over the world. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction at thisistrue.com.” —KVII-TV (Amarillo, Texas)
• “Livens up the week with bizarre-but-true news.” —Playboy
• “Truly valuable.” —Salon
• “Entertaining weekly news of unusual/bizarre nature.” —Inklings
• “This stuff is so funny, it can’t be real… but it is.” —Lockergnome
• “I think that we’d all like to believe that humans aren’t as stupid as they seem in Cassingham’s column, but we know that sometimes we are. That doesn’t make it any less hilarious to read.” —Virtual Airlines News Flash
• “You can get the news in the site sent to your e-mail address free every week, if you are interested in strange things and want some color in your life.” —PC Magazine/Turkey “Link 500”
• “‘True’ is a great place to read about Fabio getting smacked in the face by a bird, French conservative Jean-Marie Le Pen defending male nudity, and a woman who created a ceremony so she could marry herself.” —Playboy
• “[An] engaging periodical.” —Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
• “I guarantee that reading This is True will become a highlight of your week.” —Singing News
• “Whether gut-bustingly funny, merely a chuckle, a ‘blink-blink, jaw-drop’ bit, or simply something making you stop and think, the best thing about the content in TRUE is one simple, basic fact: they’re all for real.” —Brutarian
• “Fantastic Email Newsletter” —Buffer Social
• “I’m sure that like me you sign up for email newsletters that you end up rarely reading, because there’s so much to do and so little time to do it all in. Having said this, I always make the time to read the This is True newsletter, because it both informs and entertains me.” —Electronic Engineering Times
• This is True “might be the first example of an online ‘freemium’ business model.” —Huffington Post
• “A beautiful compilation of human bizarreness. Trust me, you’ll learn something new with every issue.” —Revue
• “With the internet a novel thing at the time, this quickly led to attention from the kinds of media outlets of the period — including The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Wired. Soon enough, Cassingham had a newsletter successful enough that he could work on it full-time — and he soon quit his job and moved to Colorado, where he’s lived and worked ever since.” —Ernie Smith in Tedium.
• “A Little Different but Great” —Top Email Newsletters of 2021, Tactical Marketing
• “Though it’s impossible to definitively pinpoint the first creator to crawl out of the internet’s primordial ooze, Cassingham is certainly a contender. Why did Cassingham think he could build such a business, especially when many of the basic tools of internet commerce didn’t even exist yet? He had to figure it all out himself, and in the process he helped influence innovations in modern email marketing.” —Simon Owens’ Media Newsletter
• “There’s a credible argument to be made that this man saw the creator economy and the flight to niche coming way, way before the bigger players.” —Media Voices
• This is True has also been featured on or in: the Australian Broadcast Company’s Stateside program, The Champaign-Urbana (Ill.) News-Gazette, The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, KPCC-FM (NPR, Pasadena, Calif.), The Arizona Daily Sun (Flagstaff), The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.), The Democrat and Chronicle/Times-Union (Rochester, NY), The Dallas (Texas) Morning News, The Journal Gazette (Ft. Wayne, Indiana), The Virginian-Pilot, The Toronto Sun, Nerd World, New Scientist, Business 2.0, Liberation (France), The Boulder County (Colorado) Business Report, The Industry Standard, KFRX-FM (Lincoln, Neb.), WTTM-AM (New York), KBVD-AM (Boulder, Colo.), CBC Radio (Toronto), the G. Gordon Liddy Show, and probably a bunch more I don’t know about.

Randy Cassingham has a university degree in Journalism, but he has never been a conventional news reporter. His unbounding sense of curiosity has led him to explore a number of careers, including commercial photographer, freelance writer (including magazine articles, technical articles, fiction, and screenplays), editor, publisher, ambulance medic, search and rescue sheriff’s deputy, process engineer, business consultant, software designer, and an entertaining speaker.

Randy is one of the first email publishers ever: This is True has been running continuously online since June 1994, reaching a diverse international audience with entertaining human interest content. He and his wife, Kit, live just outside Ridgway, Colorado, where they serve the community as volunteer emergency response medics. Journalists wishing to interview Randy are invited to contact him here.