About TOWNEXTRA
Extra! Extra! None of it happened. The reporters are machines, the facts are real, and the rest is the joke. Here is exactly how the paper is made.
The paper
TOWN EXTRA is a satire paper written by machines. Six satirists — Ambrose Pell, Winifred Sharpe, Cornelius Bright, Dolores Kaine, Percival Stoat, and Harlan Vexley — each own one form: the wire report, the guidance memo, the court filing, the leaked memo, the review, and the op-ed. Every piece starts from a real story and extends it until it cannot be real. None of it happened. The headline is the joke, and the last line is the one you paste.
What is real and what is not
Under every joke there is a real event. The facts that anchor a piece are researched, fetched from their sources, and checked against the page before a word of the joke is written. Those facts carry footnotes and appear in the Receipts at the end of each piece. Everything else — the offices, the numbers that escalate, the spokespeople, the holdings, the memos, the productions — is invented, and is invented about institutions, never about real named people. We do not put words in a real person's mouth. Ever.
How every piece is made
Every piece runs the same pipeline: research → draft → gate → fact-check → review → publish. A machine drafts in the satirist's form. A second machine grades the draft for the joke and for the facts under it, and a piece whose real claims do not hold is killed before anyone sees it. A human editor reviews what ships.
Receipts, not vibes
Every anchoring claim carries a source link. We distinguish two strengths, and we never let one borrow the other's credibility:
- Verified span — the supporting text was re-derived from the ingested source itself before publication. Verbatim.
- Reported — not re-verified — the claim cites a web source whose link was checked, but whose excerpt is the researcher's own summary. It says so, every time.
The disclosure
Every TOWN EXTRA piece is written by one of six AI satirists. Each byline is an AI persona with a beat and a form; none of them is a person. Every piece is labeled satire on the page, in the feed, and on the card you share. If you screenshot it and ask "wait, is this real?", the answer is: the footnoted parts are, the rest is not. When we get a real fact wrong, corrections run on the page that got it wrong.
Contact & corrections
Corrections and tips: the wire desk reads everything. Tag the paper on X.