When Bill Conway and brothers Matt and Ed Saincome started The Hard Times—a fake punk news site based in Portland and heavily inspired by the Onion—in 2014, they knew they weren’t working with the most accessible concept.
“We kind of just figured 10 friends would like it, and then 10 other people would try and kick our asses,” Conway tells me. “[Originally], we never put our names on the site because we figured some New York hardcore dude was going to have someone read an article to him, and he would be like, ‘Are you fucking making fun of my life?’”
The Hard Times quickly outpaced its founders’ expectations. “I remember we launched with six articles, and one of them was ‘Henry Rollins to Start Third Black Flag,’ because [Keith Morris had Flag, and Greg Ginn had Black Flag],” Conway says. “I remember seeing a friend of mine from back home share the article, thinking it was real, and saying, ‘Henry, we don’t want this.’
“I think within two weeks, Ron Reyes [of Black Flag] shared an article and we were like, ‘Wait, this is actually reaching people? This is just for us and our stupid friends!’”