Rahul Roushan is a 33-year-old with a penchant for news satire. In 2008, he had started a small blog where users could read news and this 'news' was essentially fake; sometime in 2009, when people started taking note of the articles, a full-fledged website was launched as ‘Faking News’.
The navigation next to the masthead features Angelina Jolie (fake quoting, of course) that she turns to Faking News when Brad (Pitt) bores her. This news-satire website publishes fictional and might we say, wildly imaginary news reports — usually spin-offs and comments on the top trending topics from the current news cycle.
“When I first started the blog, I never took it seriously. I always viewed it as ‘time-pass’ but once I realised its potential, I stopped everything else to set this up seriously,” says Rahul Roushan, the founder of Faking News.
An MBA graduate, ex-journalist and freelancer, Rahul says that Faking News has been inspired from The Onion, the American news-satire organisation; “I was always surprised that such a thing wasn’t popular in our country,” he quips.
Over the years, Faking News has created a brand name for itself; Faking News is so popular that it is now Rahul’s only source of income. Rahul believes in maintaining high standards of quality. “There have been times when I start to write something and then I am not convinced and I scrap what I wrote. I scrap almost 60-70 percent of my stories,” laughs Rahul.
There are about three to four regular contributors who write for the website and Rahul also entertains user-generated content, where he publishes around 10 user-generated fake reports under a ‘My Faking News’ banner.
Rahul informs us of some instances, where reports on Faking News were mistaken by mainstream news media to be true and were published under their banner.
An article called, “Unable to attract even a single girl, frustrated man sues Axe” was taken to be a real news report and another story titled, “Unable to figure out Google Wave, youngster kills himself” was also mistaken to be true.
Quick Read: In light of the recent Sanjay Dutt verdict, Faking News posted, Bollywood threatens to re-release RGV Ki Aag if Sanjay Dutt is not pardoned: Bollywood and Television industry came together as one today and passed a resolution stating that unless Sanjay Dutt was pardoned in the illegal arms case, RGV Ki Aag will be released again in India.
It will be the only film to release this coming Friday; no other film will be released. Films currently running successfully, like superstar Jackky Bhagnani’s Rangrezz will be removed from the theaters. TV channels will play RGV Ki Aag on loop and no other TV show, film, sports event will be shown.
Another piece titled, Man gets life-changing idea, but continues ‘time-pass’ on internet: Ravi Kumar, an avid user of life-saving services like Twitter and Facebook, got a life-changing idea earlier today, but he preferred to pass time on Twitter and Facebook rather than acting on the idea.
