This is True: Randy Cassingham's Shrewd Online Voice
This year’s Pulitzer prizes will be announced June 11 and I’m pulling for my pal Randy Cassingham, who has emerged as a breath of sensible fresh air in an age of Internet disinformation and QAnon cyber-babble.
Each week Randy offers independent social commentary to both email subscribers and those who encounter his whip-smart observations via social media or Internet searches. You can subscribe at the This is True website.
In the nearly three decades since we met, the former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory whiz-kid has added to his early fascination with “weird news” by breaking down such thorny issues as government double standards, corrupt cops and America’s checkered response to the COVID-19 virus.
Randy's work is entered in three Pulitzer categories — commentary, explanatory journalism, and editorial writing. Award competitions today recognize the fact that good writing can be done outside the media conglomerates, and something just as important: that independent points of view are critical to our ongoing national dialogue.
The goal posts have been widened across the cultural board. Nowadays, Netflix movies are winning Oscars without ever having appeared in a theater. And we're all better off for it.
And my money says that on a level playing field, Randy has as much chance as the so-called big boys in being recognized for his sensible voice.
Consider his complex breakdown of one particular shooting involving an Eaton County (Mich.) sheriff’s deputy, which occurred in the middle of America's summer of excessive-force police madness.
Published as Peak Stress, the dramatic tick-tock of the event was illustrated with photos and video from the deputy’s body-cam, plus a nearby doorbell cam.
But Randy went a step further.
Since he saw some things in that video that he didn’t see in any other coverage of the shooting, most of that video is a slow- and stop-motion version so he could point those things out, and explain them. The piece is entered in the Explanatory Reporting category for the Pulitzer prize.
There's also his interactive multimedia look at the COVID-19 pandemic, with a slant toward how our collective denial has helped propel its spread, entered for the Commentary Pulitzer. It's called The Year of Covid.
To my mind, Randy work’s features what judges seek in award-winning social commentary — clearness of style, sound reasoning and a moral purpose to influence public opinion.
I met Randy at a party in Monterey Park, not long after he started publishing his work online every week. Now he is approaching his 27th anniversary writing This is True. That’s a heck of a lot of insight.
But Randy didn’t start out trying to change the world. As I said back then, he was a regular punch line in search of a joke.
He scoured the fine-print of the day with tales of amazingly stupid criminals, outrageous lawsuits and arguments, and people caught in incredibly weird sexual situations -- and then added his own lampooning point of view that put a fresh new take on the zaniness.
I profiled Randy for the LA Times, and was amazed by this new breed of journalist. “Computer keyboard in hand, Cassingham is a humorist for the Information Age,” I wrote, “an Internet-savvy satirist and social commentator. The Jay Leno of cyberspace.”
I called Randy “the Wrong-Way Riegels of the information superhighway, the computer version of that misguided player from the 1929 Rose Bowl who ran the other way up field.
In a publishing universe scrambling into the Modern-Age computer realm, Cassingham is using his Internet column to break into the dinosaur world of print.”
See, I just didn’t get it.
It wasn’t enough to go old-school — to have your work syndicated among newspapers, there was an online audience to serve as well. The new-schoolers.
At the time, with the Internet still in its infancy, I was a journalist whose work was frozen in print. I just didn’t have the foresight to envision what Randy saw plain as day: newspapers as we knew them were beginning a decline that would steepen dramatically as the Internet grew. I was decidedly old-school.
Randy, combining his journalism degree with his NASA-fueled high-tech brain, realized that when it came to newspapers, only the biggest of the big and the thinnest of the niches would survive the shakeout.
So when Randy was successful in reaching out to to the new-schoolers, the old-schoolers reached out to him: Creator's Syndicate, the biggest in the industry, sent him a contract ...and he turned it down. He didn't need them, and he certainly didn't need to share half the revenues with them. Print outlets in four countries bought the column directly from Randy ...until they either went bankrupt or couldn't afford to buy features anymore.
Cassingham’s obtuse observations quickly became among the most popular columns on the Internet. The Washington Post said Randy specializes in “the kind of news items that keep comedians and commentators in business.” Newsweek called his work, “All the news that’s not fit to print.”
Just a year or so before, Randy had started a life-changing transition from science nerd to online funny-guy. He was a JPL technical publisher who found that creating user documents for scientists trying to get their experiments aboard the “launching real soon now” space station just didn’t bring in the laughs.
His only creative outlet was his regular posting of oddball news clippings on his office bulletin board—the cork kind—replete with his own wise-acre asides. He castrated crooked politicians and beat up the British royal family.
His audience ate it up. He was funny. Brash. Opinionated. And unpublished. While friends suggested he write a regular column, Randy had studied journalism in college and knew the world of print was a tough sell.
But he also knew a lot about computers. And that gave him an idea: He sent sample columns to 50 friends with email. If they liked what they saw, he told them, subscribe—and pass it on to their friends. They did: This is True was one of the first things online to “go viral” on the fledgling Internet, letting him quit his Day Job to work full time online when just about no one else was.
The idea was to build a following. Once distribution hit six figures he gave readers a choice: pay a small annual fee to get all the stories, or get a subset for free. So many were happy to pay he quickly outstripped his JPL salary.
Word caught on. Randy’s rocket ship just took off, as one NASA friend put it, “from JPL to outer space.” This is True predates Google—and Amazon, and eBay, and match.com.
Randy and his wife are volunteer medics serving their rural community in dramatic contrast to Los Angeles: his western Colorado home’s office windows are filled with views of the Rocky Mountains.
As he comes up his online anniversary, he still seeks out life’s oddball side. A recent post headlined “Pretty Predictable” told of some folks in Old Hickory, Tenn., who were threatened by two men, one of whom held a butcher knife.
“A 23-year-old man in the group pulled out a pistol and shot the knife-wielding robber. The man with the robber was apparently recording the scene for a Youtube video — the whole thing was a ‘prank’ to attract viewers, he told police.” Randy’s take: “Youtube obliviots: crying wolf since 2005.”
Randy long ago had started to see more of what he came to call obliviots, whose stories were not at all funny or, if readers laughed at his quips, they did so uncomfortably. He covered stories of corrupt cops and a slipshod social response to the the biggest public plague of our generation. But rather than stop with his trademark one-liner, he often expanded on his thoughts in editorials on his web site.
The four editorials submitted to the Pulitzer Prizes: Aurora Police: Not Accountable, Fixing Georgia, Make Cheating Wrong Again, and Covid: Think for Yourself (Dammit!). They're all hard-hitting, opinionated pieces based on his reported stories. Yet even after 27 years, he has no thoughts of retiring. "I'm still having lots of fun," he says, "and I still have plenty to say."
In announcing his prize entries to paid subscribers, Randy told them that “‘Thought-Provoking Entertainment’ isn’t just a This is True slogan, it’s an illustration of my mission in life: to promote more thinking in the world. If thinking was truly valued by society, the U.S. wouldn’t have had such a struggle with the pandemic.”
He also offered an insight into how he approaches his work, why he values an emphasis on thinking for yourself.
“Social commentary is a weird profession, especially the way I do it: while each story has a point, it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture without putting the puzzle pieces together,” he wrote in his introduction to the pandemic retrospective submitted to the Pulitzers.
“My commentary on the pandemic came from many different angles, thus this interactive multimedia collection that, all told, covers the progression of the story, particularly in the United States.”
Good luck, Randy.
And here's the punchline: “Go kick some ass.”