New York Times Falls for April Fools Pranks

The New York Times got punked—twice!—on April Fools’ Day, and the World Wide Web is having quite a laugh about it. First, the paper fell for a New York personal injury attorney who claimed to have been appointed “official White House law blogger,” going so far as to write it up (and then later retract it) in a City Room post, Gawker notes.

The attorney, Eric Turkewitz, goes into much greater detail about the complex prank on his blog, noting that even the intended targets of his hoax—political bloggers—didn’t bite on the obviously fake story. The second joke was more subtle—TechCrunch re-ran a 1996 article about the Times' Web debut, but replaced "World Wide Web" with "iPad”—and the paper didn’t get the joke, requesting TechCrunch remove the “inaccurate” post.
(More New York Times stories.)