EXCLUSIVE: This Bushwick engineer built a WICKEDLY good Daily Mail parody site

One of the best things about Best Stories Online is that its satirical stories aren’t really different from the Daily Mail stories it parodies. The heinous ads that show up on the sidebar and below articles look so authentic that when you click them, they turn out to actually be real ads.
The site’s creator, Patrick Steadman, said the ads were the hardest thing to get done. The recently graduated engineer living in Bushwick showed me on his phone the project he’s been working on this summer. We were at a meetup called Code, Drink, Talk: Bushwick, on one of the members’ roofs.
Though it bears no repeating, if you’re blessedly not aware of the Daily Mail, it is byte for byte the most schlocky site on the web, with stories that instill a worldview that is calculating, misogynistic and devoid of empathy. It also sets the media conversation of the day.
Although most of its stories are lifted from other publications, the Donald Trump of the web has become absolutely the leader in the tabloid sphere. When I worked for a tabloid TV show, every member of the newsroom had at least one Daily Mail tab open at all times. Stories that appeared on the Daily Mail in the morning would appear hours later on the New York Post and Gawker.

One of the things Best Stories Online gets so right about the Mail is its fixation on women’s outlook on successfully getting married. Most of the articles surrounding women (usually celebrities) focus on their bodies looking bad or good, or on an engagement or breakup. For the Mail and its readers, there seems no higher goal for women than matrimony.

So that’s why, “Comfort Eating? Iggy Azalea Spends an Entire WEEK in KFC After Being Dumped by Fiancé” is good. What ClickHole is to BuzzFeed, Best Stories Online is to the Daily Mail.

Check out more Best stories here.