Is your paper running an "April's Fool" story today?

If so, are you full of shame.

Our section editor wouldn't stop one of our guest columnists from doing it.

I'm going to tell everyone I meet that I work for Wal-Mart.

 

No.
We have never done that.
At my last stop, the EE thought it was a good idea to run a dummy page 1 on April Fools Day. Bad. Bad Idea.


Dave Hickman, WVU writer/columnist for the Charleston Gazette does an annual April Fools Day column that is usually pretty entertaining.
http://wvgazette.com/Sports/DaveHickman/200803310685

 

No. Not intentionally, at least.

 

No. Even if we published on April Fool's Day, I wouldn't allow us to run an April Fool's issue or story.

That kind of shit is barely passable for college papers. It doesn't fly for a professional newspaper.

 

Well, that's one way to avoid it. A bit extreme, don't you think?

 

Worked at paper that did A-1 April Fool's story. Hated it. I don't have a problem with an April Fool's column, however.

 

My paper did one, though as usual I wasn't told about it. Found out when I opened the front page this morning.

We've bantered around some ideas for an April Fool's story in sports the last few years but never actually did one. Probably because we think it's kind of juvenile as well.

<b>Now, me as devil's advocate:</b>
You might not think it's professional,but why is it so wrong to entertain? As long as you say at the end of the story that it's an April Fool's Day joke and make no bones about that fact, isn't it no different than running a humour column?

The only thing is that if you're running a fake story right beside one of an actual tragedy or anything else that would look equally bad on the same page, you might want to forget about the fun story that day and save it for a year when it's a slower news day.

 

I don't think that readers enjoy being jerked around by their newspaper. We're supposed to be above that. Unfortunately, sometimes we're not.

 

Hehehe. We're a weekly, so we don't come up on April Fool's Day this year anyway.

 

Who's Rich Rodriguez Monday?

 

I believe that's Rick's boy.

 

Our annual April Fool's joke is to assume people think newspapers are still relevant ... oh wait, that's every day ...