It was after giving a TED Talk about satire at Collegiate School in 2018 that Matt Daniel realized the reach of The Peedmont, the satirical news site he’d founded with friends two years earlier.
Some high school students approached him, saying that they’d studied The Peedmont as part of an elective on satire. Daniel was shocked.
“You mean to tell me that the dumb stuff that we write is being taught here in a class?” said Daniel, The Peedmont’s editor-in-chief. “That was intense.”
On Monday, The Peedmont announced that it was ceasing operations after eight years of serving as “Virginia’s Most Trusted Satirical News Source.” The Peedmont was not the victim of a corporate merger or some evil hedge fund hellbent on squeezing every last bit of profit from a media organization, but simply of Daniel and his contributors deciding to close up shop.
“It’s been a fun ride, but we’re ready to call it a day,” says Daniel, who grew up in the West End and attended Virginia Commonwealth University for marketing.
The Peedmont began in 2016 after Daniel reached out to some friends with similar senses of humor. After a few months of creating content, the site launched in September 2016. By early 2017, some Peedmont articles had already gone viral.
“We got acknowledgement from both local and national politicians, which was pretty cool,” says Daniel, who now lives in Texas.
The site’s niche was creating Virginia-focused satire. Daniel recalls a story they wrote around the time that Republicans were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act titled “New GOP Health Care Bill Eliminates Coverage For Trump-Induced Anxiety.” That didn’t get as much traction as “Archaeologists Discover Rare Parking Space In Carytown Court.”
Though The Peedmont usually scheduled stories three weeks in advance of publishing, breaking news could see The Peedmont spring into action like a regular news organization. One such instance took place in 2018 when a soldier stole a military “tank-like” vehicle from Fort Pickett and drove it through the streets of Richmond.
“Everyone was talking about it, and that happened at 10 o’clock at night,” Daniel recalls. “By the next morning, we had a story. There’s moments like that where it’s all hands on deck.”
Even though The Peedmont’s website banner clearly states that it’s satire and its name is a juvenile misspelling of “Piedmont,” readers sometimes missed the joke. The Stoney administration received angry calls and emails in 2018 after The Peedmont published “Mayor Levar Stoney Proposes Moving Monument Avenue, Leave Monuments Behind.” Another headline that some believed: “Chesapeake Bay To Be Drained, Cleaned, Refilled On Thursday.”
“There are way too many moments where people took us for real,” Daniel says. “Where are we headed as a country if you guys are taking headlines at face value without looking any farther?”
Sometimes, people would get upset about The Peedmont’s choice of target. Portsmouth and Hopewell were reoccurring punchlines.
“Some of those articles, in the comments, people would come out and be really defensive about their cities, really vulgar and threatening us,” Daniel says, mentioning one particularly angry Portsmouth resident. “We halfway thought about doing a follow-up: ‘Man Given Key to the City After Defending City’s Honor From Satirical Blog.’”
And occasionally a story didn’t land as well as they thought it would. Some readers were annoyed when, after mask mandates began returning to classrooms in Virginia, The Peedmont ran “Mask Mandate in Schools Welcomed by Commonwealth’s Ugliest Children.”
The Peedmont’s most viral headline? When former Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration was roiled by blackface scandals and an accusation of sexual assault, The Peedmont ran “State Capitol Janitor Frank Surprised to Find He’s Virginia’s New Governor” in response to the uncertainties about succession. That article received roughly 200,000 hits the week it published.
Another popular story: “Trump Team Accidentally Starts Border Wall At South Of The Border Resort.”
One of Daniel’s personal favorites was published after the Richmond Police Department questionably claimed they had thwarted a mass shooting at Dogwood Dell in 2022: “Richmond Police Reports They’re the Ones Who Killed Bin Laden.”
“We were at our best when we were doing satire,” Daniel says. “And satire doesn’t always mean comedy. Satire can hit on some dark, uncomfortable truths.”
As an example, Daniel mentions a headline that The Onion often runs after mass shootings in America: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
In an era when both fake news is rampant and social media algorithms are quick to suppress satire as “fake news,” Daniel worries about the digital reach of other satirists like The Onion.
“Satire is going to have to deal with that, and it’s going to have competition from entities that are going to be more AI-based,” Daniel says. “It’s a matter of whether or not it can actually make it to the audience.”
As for The Peedmont, Daniel says he plans to keep the site up for a while and revamp the merchandise shop.
Asked if he would allow someone else to take over The Peedmont, Daniel says he’d be happy to help someone start their own satirical site, but that he’d be hesitant to hand over the reins to something he and his friends created.
“It’s kind of our thing,” Daniel says. “It’s not just my thing, it’s our thing.”
