Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

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Before The Onion, there was Not The New York Times
When a parody of The New York Times appeared on newsstands during an 88-day strike of newspaper employees in 1978, celebrated writers like Nora Ephron and George Plimpton were credited with the coup.

It turns out, Times journalists had joined them: “Not The New York Times” was also an inside job.


Credit...Andrew Sondern/The New York Times

The parody featured three sections, 24 joke advertisements, 73 spoof articles and 155 fake news briefs, all meticulously edited to mimic The Times’s style. Even the typefaces used on the front page and the spacing of the headlines replicated those of the real paper.

The writer of one column praised Genghis Khan for his ability to “get things done,” and an in-depth investigation by a team of 35 Not The Times reporters found that cocaine “appears popular.”

“We all had a lot of time on our hands,” the designer Richard Yeend said.

After the strike ended, the Times journalists went back to work and kept quiet about their satirical moonlighting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/briefing/us-news-today.html

Spoofing The Times
Former journalists at The New York Times describe a parody of the paper in 1978 and the secrecy surrounding it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/reader-center/new-york-times-parody-paper.html