About Randy Cassingham and This is True

Randy Cassingham created This is True in 1994. It’s the oldest entertainment email publication on the Internet, and is still publishing every week.

Educated as a journalist, Randy was not interested in a career as a reporter: he wanted to skip directly to syndicated columnist. But syndicates aren’t interested in untested talent, and newspapers had already started their downhill slide, so he instead became a technical publisher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — “a great place to work,” Randy says, “if you have to work for someone else.”

At the time there was precious little content available online. Long the bastion of nerds and academics, even the thought of commercial activity on the Internet was discouraged. There was no business model for Randy to follow when he came up with his idea for a weird news commentary column, so he created his own. In essence, he realized that his earlier dream of being a syndicated columnist could be accomplished online: he could use the Internet to bypass the gatekeepers of newspaper editors and large syndication agencies and speak directly to his audience.

Today, True reaches tens of thousands of subscribers each week.

The traditional media was wowed: Randy and True were featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, Internet World, Boardwatch, Denver Post, USA Today, Wired, Playboy — even CNN. Outside the U.S., Randy and True were featured in Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan’s “Nikkei”), MediaTelevision (Toronto), the London Daily Telegraph, Monde (France), Informazione (Italy), the London Guardian, and even PC Magazine in Turkey.

Journalists loved This is True not just because of its smart, irreverent content, but because it finally gave them an example answer to the biggest question about the Internet in the 1990s: What can you do there? They held up This is True as a reply, calling it “The kind of news items that keep comedians and commentators in business”, “Best in Net Entertainment”, “Funny stuff” and more. In 1996, two years after its launch in the “Internet dark ages,” Randy quit his NASA day job to work full time online — one of the first in the world to do so. And unlike the hordes that soon followed with unlikely business models (which resulted in the “dotcom crash” of 2001), Randy (and This is True) are still going strong.

After leaving JPL Randy moved to Colorado. After decades there, he develops increasingly severe allergies to its environment and is forced to leave his adopted state. Happily, Kit goes with him to start a new life on a Residential Cruise Ship.

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So, What Is True?

This is True retells strange-but-true stories from “legitimate, mainstream” news outlets from around the world, each capped with a humorous, ironic, or opinionated comment (and, with luck, some combination of the three). On their own, the stories are pretty entertaining. But when you read the stories over time, certain themes start to emerge, and suddenly you realize there’s a bigger picture. A really big picture: a new understanding of humanity begins to emerge. Yes, True is entertaining, but it’s also truly thought-provoking. Both the fragility and the power of the individual becomes clearer. And you’ll realize that some stories only look amusing — and you’ll realize you’re actually angry! But it’s anger with a purpose: you’ll see you have the power to stand up and demand change. It’s why so many subscribers say they’ll subscribe for life.

Randy on Japan’s Taka and Toshi comedy show, June 2011.

Each week’s column consists of 10 or more odd stories, each with its own “slug” (title) and “tagline” (comment). There are two versions: a “Premium” (paid) edition with all of the stories, and a free edition with five stories. But it doesn’t stop there: each issue — whether Premium or free — also includes a Headline of the Week; usually an “Author’s Notes” section that discusses one of the issues raised in more detail, notes updates or corrections, and/or letters from readers; the extremely popular “Honorary Unsubscribe” (a brief obituary of someone interesting who perhaps even had a huge impact on your life — yet you may never have heard of them); and various other features.

Even the free newsletter has a huge amount of entertaining and thought-provoking material. You can check out the most recent issue here. If you’ve read this whole page, you’re obviously the sort of person who likes to know things, and to think. Subscribing means you only get the stories as they come out — we never send out ads-only emails, and the extremely rare non-newsletter messages always have fun content, too. If you don’t like it, you can get off the distribution with a click: there’s an unsubscribe link in every issue.

Please join tens of thousands of other today: Click Here for Free Edition Subscription Form, or set up a Premium subscription to help support True’s Thought-Provoking Entertainment.