The first page of The Final Edition lambastes The New York Times website.
Image courtesy The Final Edition

Big fan of media mockery, but getting burnt out on Gawker and The Onion? Well, we have news for you. Please welcome to the internet: The Final Edition.

The news-parody site launched Tuesday with a spoof of The New York Times website, which should come as no surprise. The Final Edition was founded by Tony Hendra, the National Lampoon alumnus and This Is Spinal Tap actor who helped create parody newspaper Not the New York Times more than three decades ago.

“We thank The New York Times from the bottom of our hearts for being so ridiculously easy to parody,” Hendra said in an e-mail to Wired.com. Following Tuesday’s Times send-up, The Final Edition’s mission is “to save humanity from the deadly worldwide scourge of funny cat videos,” he added.

The inaugural edition of The Final Edition has plenty of New York Times mockery to go around, though. Features include a faux Thomas Friedman column titled “Friedman: My World Is Flat Right Now” and a piece from the public editor explaining the reason for the flaming Times building on the site’s front page: “Arson is not merely justified, given the decayed state of our great newspaper, it is mandatory.” The parody even includes a final TimesCast video (embedded above, and somewhat NSFW).

The spoof of the Times website is just the beginning. The Final Edition will be updated with new content daily and promises writing from scribes at Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, as well as features like “Inside Rush Limbaugh” (an animated series on the conservative radio commentator’s organs) and “Mad About Maddow” — an obsessive blog about MSNBC host Rachel Maddow written by Mike Myers.

So how does The Final Edition plan to compete with the other media watchdogs and satirists? By being different and creative.

“I don’t see Gawker’s style of commentary on people and events in any way competitive,” Hendra said. “And while there’s a surface similarity with The Onion, I plan to be doing harder-edged satirical stuff than they do and in more areas…. If you put a story from today’s New York Times parody side by side with an Onion one, I think you’d already see a distinction.”

Even if it seems like it’ll be hard for the folks at The Final Edition to find new ways to skewer the media, it will no doubt be funny to watch them try.