Truth that's Stranger than Fiction - The Art of the Prank

This article, previously published in Cultura/s in June 2003, is about Michael Born, a German television reporter who made up his stories. He was far more extreme than Jayson Blair at the New York Times. He created events with actors, tomato sauce blood, etc. and sold them to German cable channels in the 1990’s.

The real question is whether Born is the only one culpable, as the court decision decreed, or were the buyers of the stories equally guilty for not checking them out. -JS

El caso de Jayson Blair y sus artàculos falseados y/o inventados en The New York Times ha supuesto un nuevo impulso para la instauracià³n del “fake journalism” –o como lo define el gran Tom Kummer, “borderline journalism”-, como género en sà mismo que tarde o temprano se estudiarà¡ en las facultades de periodismo. Continue reading “Natural Born Faker (Article is in Spanish)”

Strom writes his “Web Informant” blog about current trends in technology and Internet marketing. This appeared in the fall of 2006, and was originally published for the site TidBITS.com, a site geared towards Apple computer users. The article is updated for ArtofthePrank.com.

The news in the fall of 2006 has me confused; so let me see if I have this straight. MTV is now doing a game where you can play as one of the characters from one of their reality TV shows, a show that employs script writers. These are different writers from the ones who not too long ago were protesting that they weren’t paid enough and had to falsify their time sheets to show that they worked fewer hours.

Then there are people making money off of selling Second Life businesses that sell virtual goods to others inside their virtual world. Continue reading “The New Virtuality, and Truth is Stranger than Fiction”