Faking News – Startup Story

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Faking News is an Indian news satire website that publishes fake news reports containing satire on politics and society of India. The website also publishes occasional serious articles related to television journalism in India. The website was launched on September 15, 2008. A Delhi based management consultant, Rahul Roushan started blogging anonymously under the pseudonym “Pagal Patrakar”, (a Hindi term that literally translates to ‘crazy journalist’ in English).It was an experiment in writing for him. But it remained a blog, a personal effort, and he was not sure how long would he continue with it. There were weeks when he would not update the blog, and he would get e-mails from readers if all was well. Such instances made him to take blogging seriously and since 2010 he has started to give his full focus to Faking News only.

Faking News is one of the few websites or blogs in India using the tools of sarcasm and humor to publish news satire, as is widely done in the western countries, a trend pioneered by The Onion of USA. According to the latest Alexa rankings, Faking News lies second to The Onion among all the news satire websites in English.

In May 2013, FirstPost.com (Network18’s online news portal) has acquired FakingNews.com.