Creator of This is True and Internet Pioneer Since 1994
Randy Cassingham, an American writer, humorist, and Internet publisher, is one of the first online creators. He is best known for the Internet’s longest running “feature column,” the flagship weekly This is True®, which started in June 1994 and continues today.
True and Randy’s other projects, such as the True Stella Awards and Honorary Unsubscribe, blend real news, sharp observation, and pointed moral commentary, and have drawn a global readership for decades.
True is social commentary with “weird” news as its vehicle so it’s fun to read. Its mission follows Randy’s life mission: to provoke more thinking in the world. Hence True’s motto, “Thought-Provoking Entertainment”.
Early on, after widespread media attention, Randy was offered a contract by the then-largest newspaper feature distributor, Creators Syndicate. Despite that rare opportunity he turned the contract down, keeping True Internet-focused, as he believed newspapers would not fare well against the “most powerful printing press ever invented,” the Internet.
Other Online Publishing Projects
His work has grown into a collection of long-running online projects, some widely known, others more specialized, but all built around the same editorial sensibility. Current projects include:
- The Internet Spam Primer (founded December 1996) grew out of Randy warning his readers that “spam” (junk email) was going to turn into a big problem. As it grew longer it was made available as an email autoresponder, and then moved to its own web site in June 2002. It is periodically updated and (sadly) expanded.
- The Honorary Unsubscribe (founded January 1998) is a subfeature in the True newsletter featuring “The People You Will Wish You Had Known” — but, lamentably, you cannot meet: each honoree is recently deceased. It runs weekly unless Randy cannot find someone who died in the previous week who meets his criteria.
- Get Out of Hell Free® (founded April 2000) started as a response to a reader who told Randy he was (without any doubt) going to hell for a story he wrote. Not a content site per se, “GOOHF” turned into a viral offline/online phenomenon with actual printed Get Out of Hell Free cards: to date, more than 2.1 million have been sold and, presumably, mostly given to others.
- Randy’s Random (founded December 2000) was a long-form humor email list which ended in September 2002 after 172 issues. Readers were unhappy about that, so those humor items then found a home at a new site, also featuring long-form humor, Jumbo Joke (founded April 2004), which continued with new material through June 2016, when it was sold to a new publisher who …never got it back online. But “Random” was reborn in January 2017 as a cartoon/meme site, and still continues to be another of Randy’s occasional creative outlets.
- True Stella Awards® (founded February 2002, but not launched until that September) turned an urban legend on its head. If crazy lawsuits were an actual problem, then why did everyone online cite fake cases to illustrate that problem? Randy figured he could easily find enough true cases to create a publication out of them. Book rights went up for auction among New York publishers; that was won with Dutton (a division of Penguin/Random House) paying a six-figure advance. Having said everything he wanted to on the subject, Randy stopped issuing new awards at the end of 2007.
- Dvorak Keyboard (founded June 2002) reveals the basics behind Randy’s prolific output as a writer: the language-based keyboard layout allows for much more rapid, and much less error-prone, typing.
- Uncommon Sense (founded July 2017) is Randy’s podcast, exploring people who exhibit more than mere common sense. It was revamped and relaunched in September 2018 on an occasional basis.
- Residential Cruising (founded May 2023) reports on the new travel sector of living full-time aboard a residential cruise ship. Randy and his wife sailed on the first “affordable” ships of this kind in 2024.
Interviews/profiles of Randy Cassingham
- “Site Gags” in the Los Angeles Times in January 1996.
- “Going Out to Thousands” in the pop culture magazine Brutarian in January 2001.
- “The Inbox Pioneer” in Tedium in January 2020.
- “Was Randy Cassingham the first member of the Creator Economy?” in Simon Owens’ Media Newsletter in December 2021.
- and many more.
In addition to writing for his own sites, Randy has occasionally written for other media, including Playboy, and was a Contributing Editor for Skeptic magazine for several years. He lived in rural western Colorado, where he and his wife volunteered as medics with their county’s EMS agency, until they retired from that to travel the world full time as “digital nomads”.
To Contact Randy use the form here.