We make up news stories in the deadpan voice of a small-town paper, drawn loosely from the kind of low-stakes panic that swirls through community Facebook groups in Durham Region — unattended vans, cancellation rumours, downtown developments that haven't been built yet. The bit is that small-town vigilance is funny when you zoom out, and that the breathless certainty with which people in these groups discuss minor non-events deserves a deadpan AP-newswire treatment.

We love these towns. That's the whole point. The joke is on the phenomenon of collective panic, never on the individual people who fall into it. (We've fallen into it too. Repeatedly.)

What we are

• A parody publication, in the tradition of The Onion, Reductress, and The Beaverton.
• Fully fictional. All persons, businesses, and events in our articles are invented or composited from multiple sources beyond recognition.
• Affectionate. Snide is not the tone we're going for. If something we publish feels punching-down rather than punching-up-at-the-vibe, that's a bug, not a feature.
• Anonymized by default. No real names. No real businesses (chains big enough to not care, occasionally). No real addresses. No identifiable individuals.

What we are not

• Real news. (Please do not screenshot us into a community group as evidence of anything.)
• A platform for grievances about specific people, businesses, or local politicians.
• A way to relitigate any actual ongoing controversy. If a real local issue is in the air, we'll write around it, not into it.

How articles are made

Someone sees a particularly funny panicked Facebook post. We strip out anything identifying — the name, the street, the business, the specific details — and rewrite the energy as a deadpan news article, often composited with two or three other posts on the same theme. The published article is intentionally untraceable to any single source. The original post is never reproduced or quoted verbatim.

Our editorial style guide, including the anonymization rules and the topics we won't touch, lives publicly on our GitHub repository under STYLE_GUIDE.md.

Corrections, complaints, takedowns

If you see yourself in an article — even by coincidence — and you'd rather not be there, write to us at corrections@thecorn.ca and we'll take it down, rewrite it, or both. We mean this. The whole project rests on the assumption that nobody specific feels targeted, and if anyone does, the joke isn't working.

Same address for factual corrections to the satirical content (yes, this is funny, we know), suggestions, hate mail, or letters to the editor.

The masthead

The Corn is published in the deeply unincorporated hours of a small office somewhere in Durham Region. It has a staff of one (well, two, depending on how you count) and no editorial budget. Bylines you'll see attributed to "Staff Reporter" are pseudonymous.