{"id":81134,"date":"2014-12-29T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T14:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81134"},"modified":"2016-01-22T14:18:54","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T19:18:54","slug":"all-the-news-not-fit-to-print-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/29\/all-the-news-not-fit-to-print-2\/","title":{"rendered":"All the News Not Fit to Print"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"NTNYT\"<\/a>

\u201cSounds as if they emptied the back room at Elaine\u2019s for this one.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Calvin Trillin, in 1978, speculating on the character of those behind Not the New York Times<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0has seen surprisingly few interruptions in its 163-year history. The\u00a0paper\u00a0took five holidays in the early 1850s; a\u00a0strike in 1962\u20133 led to a nineteen-day blackout; another, in 1965, caused\u00a0four \u201cjoint\u201d publication dates, which combined the\u00a0Saturday and Sunday papers. And then there was 1978, when, from August 10 to November 4, a multiunion strike shuttered all three of New York City\u2019s major newspapers. No editions of the Times<\/em>\u00a0were printed for a record-setting eighty-eight days.<\/p>\n

Two and a half months into the \u201978 strike, though, New Yorkers awoke to find the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>unexpectedly back on newsstands, kind of. This was\u00a0Not the New York Times<\/em>, a one-off parody rife with satirical news stories, faux advertisements, and farcical editorials. Among the items on the front page were an expos\u00e9 on an exotic new drug (\u201cpronounced ko-kayne\u201d and \u201cgenerally ingested nasally\u201d), a tedious seven-paragraph report written entirely in bureaucratese (\u201cCarter Forestalls Efforts To Defuse Discord Policy\u201d), and Mayor Koch\u2019s recipe for chicken curry. There was a weather notice, too: \u201cMostly present today, still there tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spoof, it turned out, was the work of\u00a0Paris Review<\/em>\u00a0founder George Plimpton and a handful of his friends, including Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra, and Rusty Unger. Among those enlisted as \u201cjournalists\u201d were Carl Bernstein, Nora Ephron, and Terry Southern\u2014though none was exactly forthright about his or her contributions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had nothing to do with this,\u201d Cerf quipped. \u201cI can give you a list of other people who weren\u2019t involved as well. It\u2019s also not true that we used the Plimptons\u2019 apartment to put the paper together. I ought to know. I was there all week.\u201d Plimpton himself was unavailable for comment\u2014presumably tidying up after playing host to the editorial debauchery. (Incidentally,\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014also run out of Plimpton\u2019s Seventy-second Street apartment\u2014failed to meet its deadlines that fall; the staff was forced to merge its final two issues into a single Fall-Winter edition.) Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. We hope you enjoy\u2014and have a happy New Year! The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0has seen surprisingly few interruptions in its 163-year history. The\u00a0paper\u00a0took five holidays in the early 1850s; a\u00a0strike in 1962\u20133 led to a nineteen-day blackout; another, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16464],"tags":[15767,15771,15768,14,7955,15765,10814,15770,15772,15766,30,15769],"class_list":["post-81134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2014","tag-15767","tag-carl-bernstein","tag-christopher-cerf","tag-george-plimpton","tag-nora-ephron","tag-not-the-new-york-times","tag-parodies","tag-rusty-unger","tag-spoofs","tag-strikes","tag-terry-southern","tag-tony-hendra"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAll the News Not Fit to Print<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The story behind \u201cNot The New York Times,\u201d the modern standard for news satire.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/29\/all-the-news-not-fit-to-print-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"All the News Not Fit to Print by Stephen Hiltner\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 29, 2014 \u2013 We\u2019re out until January 5, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2014 while we\u2019re away. 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