This week we celebrated one of my favorite holidays — April Fools' Day.
I'm not one to pull a lot of April Fools' Day pranks. It's not because I don't have ideas, it's mostly because I don't, personally, like being messed with. I figure if I start pulling pranks on others, they'll start pulling them on me and that is not a precedent I want to set.
And so I've never pulled my absolute favorite April Fools' prank, though I've been tempted many times. Seeing as I don't plan on pulling it, I'll tell you all what it is.
It's an office prank. You take a paperclip and place it on the copy machine and run about 50 copies off with the paperclip printed on them. Then you take that paper and put it back in the tray and remove the paperclip. Now every person who makes a copy will have a paperclip on their copy as well. They'll tear the copier apart trying to find where the paperclip is stuck. I think it's great, but I'm too afraid of pulling it and getting in trouble after the fact.
So while I don't pull many pranks myself, I love seeing the ones others pull. The internet is generally my favorite place on April Fools' Day. You never know what is real and what is fake. Google has had some great April Fools' Day jokes. The best ones, in my opinion, are the ones that are just realistic enough that you believe them for a few seconds, but ridiculous enough that you realize it's definitely a joke pretty quickly.
One of my favorite companies did one even better several years ago, however. I've written before about wanting to get into racing simulations with iRacing. If you're not familiar with iRacing, it started out as a racing simulator for a few series, including NASCAR, and over the years it has added everything from IndyCar to RallyCross to offroad trucks. It started out with only asphalt series, and on April Fools' Day several years ago, the company released a trailer teasing that it was going to release a dirt racing series.
They let it sit there for a while, with everyone assuming it was an April Fools' joke, and then a few weeks later it was revealed that it wasn't a joke at all. I thought that was a great way to do it. Make it a joke, but then surprise everyone with the joke being that it wasn't a joke at all.
One place I don't feel April Fools' jokes are appropriate, however, is in the newspaper. I've seen many newspapers attempt April Fools' jokes on their pages or on their websites. I've been a part of a few of them in my past, but in protest.
Newspapers are here for people to get information about what is going on in their community. It is our job to provide factual and accurate information to the best of our knowledge and ability. How can we do that if we're running a fake story in the newspaper?
For one, I believe the space in the newspaper is too valuable to waste on a fake story. A lot of these stories appear on the front page, but on a daily basis my staff and I have to make the difficult decision about what we should run on the front page here in the Tribune, and almost daily there is something left off that could have been on the front. Why would I waste that space with something that isn't even real? How is that providing a service to the reader?
In addition, in this era of "fake news," there is absolutely no reason to add fuel to the fire. When I worked at a paper that ran April Fools' stories, the entire paper that week was a waste. No one believed any of the stories in the paper, because if one was an April Fools' joke, they probably all were.
Being a journalist is a constant fight for credibility, and intentionally running a fake news story in a sorry attempt to be funny is a disservice not only to your publication, but to all the others that choose not to participate.
In the end, what does an April Fools' joke do? It makes a fool out of the person who believes it, hence the name. I don't want to make my readers out to be fools. That's not my goal in this job.
So leave the jokes to the actual comedians, the ones whose job it is to be funny, and let's do what we do best — provide our readers with facts and accurate information.
Eric Young is the editor of the Huron Daily Tribune. He can be reached at 989-623-3187 or eric.young@hearstnp.com.
April 03, 2021 at 05:09PM
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