Associated Guess
From The Extended Group
cocnacaboli The Associated Guess is a satirical internet news source produced by Brett Hilyer and Kevin Devoss. The name is a play on the Associated Press, an actual news media outlet, referenced on the website with its similarly looking "AG" logo written in bold red print.
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History
The 'Guess' as it is known colloquially between Kevin and Brett, originated in the spring of 2005, when Brett decided to revive the idea of writing an internet news parody in the vein of The Onion, and purchased http://associatedguess.com. From 2002-2003 Brett had published a similar, but less generally ambitious satirical newspaper, The Basilisk, which was at least partially aimed at parodying actual group events and other inside jokes. This time, the goal was to produce a more professional, broadly reading, humorous take on current events.
Issue One[1] was published on June 1, 2005. A subsequent issue appeared one week later. Issue Three was half-way completed before the project inexplicably ran out of steam, and no new editions were released for the remainder of the summer.
In the last few weeks of September, Kevin proposed a joint partnership in writing articles for the site. Under this new conglomerate, Issue Three[2] finally came out on September 28. Since then all writing has been partitioned equally between Kevin and Brett.
Layout
Under the website's banner there are two columns, one for "Developing Stories," which are simply topical images with one-liner captions in bold underneath, and a headlines section, where 150-250 word articles are placed next to an accompanying picture. To the far right there is a link the site archive[3] above a banner advertising for the Drawing Game. At the very top of the page, a news crawl moves across the page, usually with a more obscure or trivial news joke.
Ocassionally there is a "theme" edition, in which all articles refer to a single news story. Issue Three did this with Hurricane Katrina, and Issue Five[4] with the Iraq War.
Publishing schedule
The website is notorious for its irregular updates and lack of a consistent release schedule. Initially, new editions were supposed to come out ever week, but after the first missed deadline, any notion of a timetable became obsolete. Readers sometimes refer to 'the November/December issues,' implying a monthly release, but this is a purely unintentional effect of poor scheduling. So far there has been no new edition for the month of January.
Notoriety
The Associated Guess recently appeared on dmzog's directory list of satire websites[5] in which it is described as "Political comment concentrating on the Iraq war."
Trivia
The site has since its inception had a consistent and inexplicable source of hits from the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
