About the paper
We made all of this up
The Preferred Narrative is a satirical newspaper. It looks like a newspaper on purpose, because that is the joke. It is not one.
Disclaimer — please read this bit straight
Everything published on The Preferred Narrative is satire, parody, and comedy. It is fiction. It is not news. And it is written by our AI friends. Every article on this site is invented for the purpose of making someone laugh, and generated by AI. Nothing on it is a report of anything that happened.
That means, plainly and without a punchline attached:
- It is written by AI. The articles on this site are generated by artificial intelligence — our AI friends, who have never attended a press conference, verified a source, or left the building. There is no reporting behind any of it, because there is no reporter behind any of it.
- Nothing here is a statement of fact. No article, headline, quote, statistic, or caption on this site should be read, cited, shared, or relied upon as a factual claim about any real person, company, government, organisation, product, or event.
- The quotes are invented. Nobody said any of the things attributed to anybody. Any quotation you find here was written by us, for a joke, and was never spoken by a real person.
- The people are invented. Names, bylines, sources, experts, and officials appearing in our articles are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons — living, dead, or merely famous — is either coincidental or obvious parody, and in neither case a factual assertion about them.
- Real topics, unreal reporting. Our jokes may riff on real subjects in the news, because that is what satire does. Riffing on a subject is not the same as reporting on it. We do not describe real events, and we are not a source of information about them.
- Nothing here is advice. Not legal, financial, medical, technical, culinary, or romantic. If an article on this site appears to advise you to do something, please do the opposite, or better yet, nothing.
- If you are unsure whether something here is real: it is not. That is the whole rule. There are no exceptions to it anywhere on this site.
This site is published as commentary, humour, and parody. It is protected as such, and it is labelled as such — on every page, in the header and the footer, so that nobody has to guess. If a piece of writing from this site reaches you without that label attached, the label still applies.
If you have arrived here after reading something of ours and becoming very upset that it was untrue: yes. Correct. It was untrue on purpose, and you have just experienced the product working exactly as designed.
What this is
The Preferred Narrative is an original satirical paper written by our AI friends. We write in the voice of a newsroom that takes itself extremely seriously and should not. The house style is flat delivery: the jokes arrive at length, with a byline and a dateline and no wink, because a straight face is funnier than an elbow in the ribs.
The masthead reads “The version of events we have decided to go with.” and we intend to earn it. Our beats are the ordinary absurdities of modern life — work, technology, money, politics as a genre of entertainment, and the strange things people do at brunch.
We write about the world. We do not write about specific real individuals as though we know what they did, said, or think. There is an enormous amount of comedy available without doing that, and we would rather go get it.
The masthead
Editor-in-Chief
Vacant — the chair spins on its own
Copy Desk
One dictionary, opened to “affect”
Investigations
Investigating where the coffee filters went
Corrections
Fully staffed, tragically
Corrections policy
Because none of our articles are factual, none of them can contain a factual error, which we consider our finest achievement as journalists.
We will, however, promptly fix the things that actually matter: a piece that reads as a genuine claim about a real person, a joke that lands somewhere we did not intend, a typo in a headline, or anything that makes it harder to tell at a glance that this is a comedy site. Those are real problems and we treat them as such.
Standing correction
An earlier version of this website contained no articles.
The current version also contains no articles. We regret both errors equally and are working on precisely one of them.
Still not news. Still not going to be.
SATIRE