It’s been interesting to watch the cadence of Pique’s online web traffic in the wake of Facebook’s ban on Canadian news.
As with every other news organization in the country, there were questions about how well our stories would do once we couldn’t shove them in front of everybody’s face while they were sitting on the toilet or ignoring their family.
In the before time, in the long, long ago, there were certain stories you always knew would “go off,” so to speak, once they hit the socials.
Unusual crimes, quirky headlines, offbeat characters or quotes, engaging photos, anything to do with Whistler Blackcomb, and of course, anything tragic.
If it bleeds, it leads, as the old saying goes, and with the viral properties of social media, a good story could rack up thousands of clicks in no time.
Would that all go away once we couldn’t actively share our stuff?
Fortunately, wonderfully, magically, eternally gratefully, the answer is no—people are still finding our stories. And the stories that used to “go off” on social media are still going off on our website, thanks to Pique’s incredible, loyal readership (seriously, thank you).
In fact, Pique has enjoyed its best months ever in terms of digital traffic to start 2025, topping 800,000 monthly pageviews for the first time (thanks in large part, it should be said, to the news apps on an untold number of devices putting Pique stories in people’s faces while they’re sitting on the toilet. Thank you, random news aggregation apps, and God bless you).
But even without the aggregators, it’s our local readership driving engagement on our local stories, boosting us presumably entirely by word of mouth.
We saw it again this week on Tuesday, April 1—April Fool’s Day.
Pique’s silly, made-up story about Whistler annexing Pemberton, complete with a plethora of repurposed Donald Trump quotes about Canada, racked up more than 6,000 views in its first 12 hours on Pique’s site, blowing every other story out of the water.
It’s fun to watch any story do so well, but it’s admittedly a bit disheartening to consider that people seem to really love silly, made-up nonsense more than actual news. Or maybe it’s just the novelty of it all—seeing the local newspaper do its one goofy, satirical story for the year, and maybe even getting taken for an unexpected ride. And then sharing the fun with a friend or two.
Or, more likely, maybe we all just need a good laugh every now and then, as many readers conveyed to Pique after reading the story on April 1.
And the most reliable route to a laugh is often through satire.
Done well, satire is both silly, childish fun and a blistering weapon of opposition, all at once. It can take the most powerful and awful of men and boil them and their bullshit down for all the world to point and laugh at. It strips the brazen, absurd insanity of being a human being down to its studs—and suddenly it doesn’t seem so big and scary.
But maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see a satirical story do so well on Pique’s website.
The concept is as old as civilization itself, dating back to at least Ancient Greece. Aesop’s Fables (c. 600 BCE) may well be the first known example of satire. Writers like England’s William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and France’s Voltaire (1694-1778) were key in refining it, sharpening its edges so they cut just that much deeper, while novelists like George Orwell arguably perfected it. But satire has always been there, as humanity chugged along, serving as a reminder that none of us—not kings, or clergy, or presidents, or billionaires—are truly beyond ridicule.
There’s a sense of camaraderie in that—a feeling of being “in on the joke,” while the high and mighty are on the outside looking in, for once.
And satire has always had a place in newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer, possibly the most famous newspaperman ever, once said “what a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humour, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation, and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!”
Ironically, Pulitzer would become a target of some cutting satire himself during his famed circulation war with fellow publisher William Randolph Hearst (the primary inspiration for the main character in Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane—though Welles might have also thrown some Pulitzer into the character) during the notorious “yellow journalism” period of late-1890s New York.
But perhaps the late American columnist Molly Ivins put it most succinctly when she said satire is “the weapon of the powerless against the powerful”—something to inspire some hope where it may not previously exist. Even if it’s just a glimmer (at first).
Or maybe we just like dumb jokes about nudity, and being taken for a ride sometimes.
