Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’ - The New York Times

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html?action=click&contentCollection=business&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article&version=newsevent&rref=collection%2Fnews-event%2Felection-2016

TBILISI, Georgia — Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the 
nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from America’s voracious appetite for passionately 
partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to 
soar.

“I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course 
when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real — and completely fake 
— news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.

More than 6,000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar 
observation. Mr. Egan’s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not 
trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a “gold mine.” His traffic soared and 
his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze 
and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites.



..l




-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20161129062430:63380CC0-B626-11E6-9C91-F9607D06CD24
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com