The Satirist Next Door
by Cal Newport

One night late last July, a curious crowd gathered at a red sauce pasta joint tucked into a crowded block in the West Village. This group, which had grown to around 20 people, mixed, among others, college kids with middle-aged professionals and stand-up comedians with Wall Street financiers. In the center, fidgeting with nervous enthusiasm, sat Greg Galant, the 25-year-old host of the party. Greg had a smile on his face. Just a few moments earlier, he had heard something that had smoothed his gnawing anxiety. A simple phrase that, in Greg's mind, validated the experiment he begun just a few months earlier, based on little more than an idea he could not shake. The occasion that sparked this relief might have been a cause for confusion or distress in almost any other environment. But here, among this crowd, and especially to Greg, it made inevitable, perfect sense. A large man had entered the room and, without a trace of irony, proclaimed: "Hi, I'm Britney Spears."

A few weeks before this gathering, Greg, a group of friends and assorted big media refugees, launched NewsGroper.com. The site, self-described simply as "News Analysis by News Makers," is, in reality, the apex predator in an insurgent new form of satire: the fake first-person blog. The idea behind this format is simple: an anonymous blogger pretends to be someone famous. News Groper has a staff of over 50 volunteer writers, each of whom blogs on behalf of a different celebrity personality. The site's roster includes George W. Bush, Britney Spears, Christopher Walken and Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq.

The reason Greg felt relief when his Britney Spears introduced himself in character was because this proved that his writers understood their task. They understood the commitment necessary to pull off a quality fake post; how to transcend stereotype and hit that satiric sweet spot where verisimilitude and commentary mix in perfect proportion.

At its best, the fake first-person blog is a nimble vehicle for satire — reacting instantly to the latest crisis in the news cycle. Within hours of President Bush's October 4th decision to veto children's healthcare, his News Groper doppelganger had posted a blog entry titled: "Children are plenty healthy as is." In mid-September, when John McCain was coming under fire for his shifting religious positioning, Fake McCain responded, in a post titled "The point is, I like Jesus," with an overwrought metaphor equating Christians with canned beans. (The post culminates with the helpful clarification: "In this metaphor, as in real life, I am sustained by beans.")

News Groper, however, represents more than just a new source of online humor. This small media company, with its upstart young staff (the average age is 25), and its fledgling army of volunteer writers, poses a serious challenge to the very foundation of modern professional humor production. To understand this claim, we must start at the beginning.

Six months prior to the News Groper launch, Greg Galant controlled a modest online media empire. His podcast, Venture Voice, had developed a decent-sized audience. Over five thousand listeners a week would download his hour-long interviews of dot-com business celebrities.

Having spent his college years working first at a high-tech venture capital firm and then at cnn.com, Greg had learned the practical art of monetization. After Venture Voice hit its stride, Greg started RadioTail, a technology company that paired podcasts, including his own, with audio advertisements. Soon, McGraw-Hill, BusinessWeek and TheStreet.com, among others, became clients.

"Between the two companies, I gained insight about how to build an audience online and how media companies function, big and small," says Greg. But podcasts had a limit. The audience of a popular podcast is infinitesimal compared to a popular website. Venture Voice might pull in five thousand listeners a week, but a major entertainment portal such as The Onion will receive over 7,000,000 page views in the same period. Even a small blog, with only a few hundred subscribers, can easily generate thousands of weekly page views. There isn't much money in audio.

"I started looking for new opportunities for media companies," says Greg. His attention soon snagged on a phenomenon that, at the time, was whipping furiously across the Internet. An anonymous blogger, known colloquially as "Fake Steve Jobs," had started, in the summer of 2006, a blog titled "The Secret of Diary of Steve Jobs." This fake first-person blog received broad attention. The anonymous impersonator produced biting, insider commentary on topics ranging from Job's purported megalomania (on August 16, 2006, Fake Steve Jobs quips: "it's not that I'm insecure. And yet ... I dunno. I just keep reminding myself, Jesus didn't go to college either"), to a seething dislike of the open source free software movement (whose members are dubbed "freetards" by FSJ).

In January 2007, when Greg was contemplating his next move, the fervor around Fake Steve Jobs had just begun its shift into the mainstream. (That month, for example, saw the first posts about the unnamed satirist make it onto ValleyWag — the scurrilous Silicon Valley gossip blog run by Nick Denton.) "I realized that Fake Steve Jobs was successfully connecting with audiences," says Greg. "The challenge, however, with this format, is that there would be a star but then it would fade away when the person ceased to be relevant. The writer wouldn't know how to make a business about it. So I had an idea: to build a Huffington Post of fake first-person blogs."

From this insight, News Groper was born. With enough fake bloggers, each covering a different news maker, the site could avoid the fading of relevancy that would plague attempts that focused on a single character. Eventually, the site could become a destination for a reader to find, within hours, a humorous, Daily Show-style skewering of the latest media event. "Our goal," says Greg, "is to make parody that's relevant to the news cycle."

In April, Greg went into action. He pitched the idea to Adam Varga, the founder and behind the scenes tech guru from the popular underground music podcast Daily Sonic. Adam agreed to become the News Groper COO and guide the effort to build the all-important software backend. (At 27, Adam is the oldest member of the staff.)

Later that month, Greg convinced a college friend, Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell, to leave a job at Mother Jones to become News Groper's Marketing Director. Soon after, Jared Neumark, another college friend, got the call. At the time, Jared was walking the crime beat for the New York Post. "I was covering tragedies — rapes and fires — trying to get quotes from families," says Jared. "I hated this." He soon agreed to take on the role of editor.

By early July, Jared and Kosh had recruited over 50 volunteer writers. "This was definitely really hard work," says Greg. "This is one of the hardest parts of the business; it got done only through sheer force of will." The writers came from all corners. They included young recruits from college humor magazines, professional freelancers, businessmen and bored artists. A well-known venture capitalist joined the team, as did an established finance reporter and an editor from The New Yorker.

On July 16, 2007, the site went live. Its opening salvo in the arena of public satire was a post by Fake Vladimir Putin titled "36 Hours in Kennebunkport." The opening paragraph remarks: "I arrive to find not one, but two George Bushes. I admit that I am not sure which one is which, so I call off my plan to crush the president's larynx with my KGB death grip." The era of the professional fake first person blog had begun.

To understand what makes News Groper radical is to understand the source of its commentary. Early in the recruitment process, Jared sent a note to an active duty solider in Afghanistan who maintained an often humorous blog on the war effort. Two months passed. Then, one day, the following e-mail landed in Jared's inbox:

This offer still open? This thing still going down? I'd love to do something with you guys if so — got some down time between missions.

The solider signed up to blog as Fake General Petraeus. His first post, which went live on Aug. 14 with the title "I've never put lipstick on a pig, just a little blush," captures the tension of the General's visits to Capital Hill:

I mean, if anyone had taken the time to sample, let alone digest, my 240-page counterinsurgency manual, they'd see that they're using a short-order chef to prepare a dinner gala at the White House.

His posts gain power through authenticity. This is not the New York Times op-ed page being parroted in witty barbs by a staff writer for The Onion. This is written by someone who, around the same time as this post, mentioned casually to Jared: "I only had 20 minutes to work yesterday...IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emergency, won't go into it." He's living the insurgency, and the Petraeus posts, though often hysterical — he's quick to pick up on Petreaus's quirks, well-known among soldiers, such as his constant references to old generals — also ooze with urgency.

This pattern of connecting industry insiders with relevant fake personalities repeats frequently in the News Groper universe. The Fake Stephen Schwartzman (CEO of private equity giant The Blackstone Group) is written by a finance reporter. Fake Britney Spears is penned by someone in the entertainment industry. Fake Shinzo Abe, the recently deposed Prime Minister of Japan, is handled by a Tokyo resident.

These connections form the core of the News Groper concept. Other online humor portals have used a volunteer, part-time writing staff. But this is often a cost-saving measure. Money permitting, they would much prefer to follow the route of The Onion, The National Lampoon (before it got bought out and neutered by a large conglomerate) and The Daily Show, and assemble a staff of professional humor writers who meet every day in the sacred writers room to riff off each other and produce the best possible humor.

Not News Groper.

"Our writers are driven to satire by what they see going on in their own world," says Greg. "A good satirist is driven to comment on that, to make fun of it, to get inside the mind and twist it." As Jared adds: "Our writers bring insight to their character's field that other writers, who sit around all day in a writer's room, could not bring."

This is the News Groper gamble. Its founders see a public that is tired of the AP style of equal-time reporting on issues; the reflexive inclusion of quotes from all sides because of what Greg describes as a "terrible fear of bias." Increasingly, people want to hear: "This guy is full of shit. Let me tell you why." Satire fills this need. News Groper hopes that their model of distributed, industry insider writers, will bring news cycle-relevant satirical commentary to a new level of power and authenticity.

On August 20th, at the height of the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal, Fake Al Sharpton posted an entry titled: "Don't let this guilty plea fool you, Vick is innocent (like OJ)." At the core of this short, three-paragraph missive was the claim:

Consider this: If the police caught Brett Favre running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other to the death, would they bust him? Of course not.

The next day, something strange began to occur. "We started to see hundreds of visitors coming in from MSNBC.com," recalls Greg. "How could that be happening?"

They soon discovered that MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson had published an article on the site that quoted the Fake Al Sharpton's dolphin fighting comment as legitimate. It included a link back to News Groper.

Chaos ensued.

Close to 150 energized comments popped up under the News Groper post. The discussion jumped from issues of racial politics, to morality, to the nature of news coverage. The tone ranged from sometimes insightful to, more often, deranged. But one thing was clear: this may have been the only place that such a diverse range of voices on the issue had a chance to get together in a single forum and have at it.

BOOKMARK WITH: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon