Really, Internet?
Today is April 1, aka April Fool’s Day. I haven’t thought of it as the latter for a number of years, mainly because I didn’t spend all day getting punk’d–until now.
What changed? Well, I’m more plugged in than ever before, and apparently the Internet is the last place in the world where it’s a blast to go around spreading merry misinformation all day.
YouTube turned all its videos upside down. Jezebel announced the end of comments. Google did whatever this is. Even London’s The Guardian newspaper got in on the act, announcing a new plan to relay the news solely in Twitter posts. Locally, this happened — or didn’t, actually.
Coming from an old-school news background (this whole post is making me sound like a crotchety 97-year-old, so why not go with it?), it’s hard to make heads or tails of this. Clearly, audiences are having fun with it, but could a newspaper around here ever pull a similar prank?
Seems unlikely. When you spend all day thinking about building and maintaining audience trust, it seems counterintuitive to squander it–particularly when it’s pretty much all we’ve got going for us at the moment. Or are we just missing the joke?
