N.Y. Times fake fools commuters

NEW YORK—Commuters across the United States found out during yesterday’s morning rush hour that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had ended and global warming, health care spending, and the economy’s problems were on their way to being solved.
On behalf of a collective of liberal activists, 1,000 volunteers across the country handed out 1.2 million copies of a spoof of The New York Times, dated July 4, 2009.

At first glance, the parody, which used the Times’ Gothic-style font on the nameplate, easily could be mistaken for the real thing.
The 14-page paper, which also announced the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for CEOs, and a recall for all gasoline-fuelled cars, showed up in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
The pranksters, who include a film promoter, a college teacher, journalists, and others, said they wanted to encourage the administration of Democratic president-elect Barack Obama to keep its promises.
The publication was funded by small, online contributions “to maintain the pressure on the people we’ve elected so they do what we’ve elected them to do,” said a journalist who identified himself as Wilfred Sassoon and said he helped create the paper with about 30 other people, many who work at New York daily newspapers.
He acknowledged Wilfred Sassoon was an assumed name he used for the project because he wanted to protect his real job at a newspaper in the New York area.
Steven Lambert, an editor of the parody who teaches art at New York’s Hunter College and Parsons The New School for Design—and gave his real name—said the project was a success.
“This really resonated with people on the street,” Lambert said. “First, there was a moment of, ‘How could this be true?’ But then people enjoyed this feeling of, ‘Ah, amazing things really could happen!’
“The paper provides this vision of what’s possible if we all work together.”
Lambert said the team included three New York Times staffers whose names will remain secret.
On the Times’ website, spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: “This is obviously a fake issue of The Times. We are in the process of finding out more about it.”
Sassoon said the project started about six months ago when “a little group of journalists were sitting around having a beer.”
The group posted a small notice on Craigslist soliciting volunteer writers and others to help. The fake paper was printed at presses around the country and The Yes Men, a New York-based prankster group, provided software and Internet support.