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Laughing gas
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Feb. 22, 2000 | Media News is one of those places people in the media start their day, looking for stories about the media (which Romenesko tirelessly culls from hundreds of sites and papers) as well as -- sorry, Poynter -- gossip. It's insidery in an unapologetic fashion, largely devoid of the snide attitude and innuendo that marks much media coverage. Not so Media Gossip News, a spot-on parody of the site that had almost as many people in the media talking as Media News did. While frequent readers of Media News might note the number of defections from Brill's Content, the parody made a point of the trend with the news that Steven Brill was leaving his own magazine. ("I've enjoyed my time at Brill's Content. My departure is amicable; there is no truth to the rumor that I wasn't getting along with myself.") Ditto Michael Wolff's repeated assertion, "I have an idea for a new media company." Or the link to Salon's "Whores Who Think." According to Michael Colton, one of the site's authors and co-founder of the nascent Modern Humorist, the parody was "really just a press release. We could have sent an e-mail to people like you saying, 'This is what we're going to do.' Instead we decided just to show you." Savvy move, that. As most please-look-at-my-Web-site messages get buried in the bulk of the day's missives (and washed over by each issue's deadlines), a good laugh is oft sought yet rarely found -- especially on the Web. This was part of what motivated Colton (himself part of the Brill's diaspora) and his partner John Aboud to launch Modern Humorist. "Humor on the Web is a pretty dismal lot," says Colton. "People who put up a site in their spare time and tell Star Trek jokes. The Onion is great but an editor there even said, 'It's not that we're the best humor thing on the Web -- we're the only humor thing on the Web.'" And there's nothing particularly webby about the Onion (as the phenomenal success of the book pulled from its pages, "Our Dumb Century," will attest). You could say the same of McSweeney's, which in the realm of hype must be this year's Onion. (A link on Modern Humorist's Media News parody salutes McSweeney's founder with a faux link: "Dave Eggers -- No trouble getting laid these days.") Modern Humorist, which will formally launch this spring, vows to be more multimedia. A parody of Talk magazine that Colton and Aboud put up weeks before Tina Brown's much touted launch party featured video (though the site itself was more a deft mimesis of Talk's marketing hype). That site, which Colton did at home in his spare time, was promoted via "guerrilla tactics" -- e-mail from a fictional ad agency contemplating buying space in the magazine. A similar attempt to hype the millennium site 2000 Times Square backfired. Aboud "leaked" journalists an official NYC directive that read, in part, "In compliance with the safety plan authorized yesterday, anyone attempting to attend the Times Square New Year's Eve celebration, which will be held this year on December 31, must appear with a Jubilee Permit, authorized by this office." "Too close to reality," Colton says now. "Giuliani could easily have done something like that."
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