No joke.

Posted on 4/2/2004 by Dylan

Note to Google: Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to launch Gmail on April 1.

Note to Slashdot, BoingBoing, Engadget, and nearly every other tech blog: Running fake stories for April Fool’s Day might seem funny to you, but none of these stories were actually all that funny. Worse, they had the unfortunate side effect of making every single thing you posted that day, including Gmail announcements, completely suspect.

Sheesh. And bloggers wonder why journalists are still in business.

UPDATE April 4: Engadget didn’t run any bogus stories, other than linking to that left-handed phone thing, and they’ve corrected that. Apologies to Peter Rojas for lumping him in with the rest of the blogetariat.

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  • http://www.engadget.com Peter Rojas

    I’m not sure what fake stories Engadget ran. We didn’t produce any fake stories, and when we did discover that we had unwittingly linked to one (the left-handed Sony Ericsson cellphone, which originated with Sony Ericsson themselves), we did note that it was a hoax on the site.

  • http://dylan.tweney.com Dylan Tweney

    The point of my post is this: from the reader’s perspective, there’s not much difference between making up your own April Fool’s story and passing along someone else’s April Fool’s story without comment. In both cases it hurts the reader’s ability to trust your publication.

    And although Engadget did run a correction, this wasn’t noted on the original post. If someone linked to that post (as I did) they might never notice the correction.