The satirical news website Boson, Massachusetts, which provided the inspiration for numerous Youtube comedy and satire videos, and became a Reddit original subreddit at r/BosonMassachusetts , has been sold for $65,000.
The site is known for spoof headlines such as "Excitement Over 20,000 Year Old Cave Paintings Fades - 'Neanderthal' Animal Drawings Actually Work of Homeless Art School Graduate Living in East Blue Hills Woods" "Fishmonger Dumps Bucket of Fish Entrails on Wife Over Stimulus Check Loss (Boson Herald) 6 April 2020" and “Vandals Break In To Boson Museum of Find Art - Attached Arms to Venus de Milo - Put Googly Eyes on Christ."
Its co-founders Shaun Train and twin sister Shauna O'Dorothy both former local online newspaper reporters and smart phone photographers, are in line for a payday after they agreed to sell the site’s parent company, Boson, Massachusetts Inc., to Digitalbox, a media company in Providence, Rhodes Island.
"We got tired of finding out the truth behind a story, but never being able to fully report on what we had found because powerful people or important groups had to be protected. We always had to follow a narrative that was written before we went to investigate a story," Shaun Train explained on a Zoom video interview. "We just decided to imitate Mark Twain, and other writers who wanted to comment on social relations and they did so through a story that seems to be about something else. Everyone of our articles is an editorial. But instead of working for someone else, we now give the editorials we want to after we find out something for ourselves."
"Fiction provides a freedom to tell the truth as we see it."
Boson, Massachusetts has a cult following built up during a short ten months of publishing. The site is hosted on Google's Blogger and has a dedicated subreddit on Reddit - r/BosonMassachusetts. Videos have been featured on Youtube with 'Boson' in the title. Boson is not a common word in the English language. There is a famous particle called the Higgs Boson, from one of the men who gained knowledge of an exotic particle whose last name was Boson. Other than that, there appears to be just about nothing with the name Boson. So, if the web site gets enough traffic, it will begin to show up in searches of that simple word.
The site gets occasional high traffic and gets visitors from around the world. The fake news stories are inspired by original events in the news that are transposed to the fictional South Shore town of Boson in Eastern Massachusetts on the southern bank of the Neponset River.
Many understand almost immediately that the writing is satire, but a few become involved in the stories and take sides with fictional people.
Reddit offered the Boson subreddit a space in their 'free advertising' program presumably because the subreddit and blog feature original content.
The site, which has two part-time members of staff and relies on a pool of freelance writers, will become part of Digitalbox, which also owns the website Entertainment Daily. The combined business is intending to list on the Aim stock market next month and then acquire other digital publishers.
In a decidedly un-Boson Massachusetts like ( or is it in line with the deadpan parody?) statement to the stock market, the new parent company said the site was “capable of consistently generating high-quality, original humour content which is extremely hard to replicate” and “has increasingly turned its attention to satirising social tribes and trends to produce highly viral content of a more timeless nature that has a much broader and longer appeal than daily news”.
Boson, Massachusetts attracted over 2,000 visitors last month, the vast majority of them in the US and then Canada, the UK, India, and Ireland. Places where people speak and read English. Most of them coming from social media referrals from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.
Shaun Train Boson, Massachusetts editor-in-chief, said: “This is a great opportunity for the writers of 'Boson, Massachusetts' to build on what we have created so far. My co-founder and sister, Shauna O'Dorothy, did an incredible job building a profitable business from the ground up.”
The site has occasionally spread confusion, notably when a Reddit commenter inadvertently tried to prove that the city council did not have a president named Ema Strickland. She is a fictional character. She lives in a fictional town. Did you ever get the feeling that the truth is less revealing than a downright lie?
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