News reports fabricated by Universal Pictures (not aliens)

Aliens have been abducting Americans. Fact. Or, at least, it seemed it be according to Alaskan news publications.

Universal Pictures has just  paid out $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club after it released a series of elaborately faked online news stories, claiming to be from real Alaskan news publications and attesting to supernatural activity.

Actually, they were a clever publicity stunt designed to promote new film ‘The Fourth Kind” (strap line: “there are four kinds of alien encounters. The fourth kind is abduction.”)

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, one of the victims of the hoax, reports:

To bolster that claim, articles were posted that professed to be from real Alaska publications, but were actually created to bolster the movie's storyline.

The articles included an obituary and news story about the death of a character in the movie, Dr. William Tyler, that supposedly were from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Neither the story nor the obituary ever appeared in the newspaper. Fake articles were listed from other newspapers in Alaska, including the Nome Nugget, alongside authentic news stories. Part of the settlement requires Universal to remove the fake 'news articles' promoting the movie from the Internet.

The bad news? “If people can’t rely on the fact that when they look at a news article on the Web that it’s from the newspaper it appears to be… it erodes confidence in the world of journalism,” says a lawyer representing the wounded newspapers.

The good news? The $20,000 has doubled the Alaska Press Club’s annual revenues.

(Hat tip: The Big Picture)