The Onion alternative for people who already follow tech news

The best Onion alternative for people who follow the tech industry is TechTwitter IO, a free satirical daily paper that does to tech Twitter what The Onion does to American news. This guide shows how to fit it into a news routine you already have, without mixing up the jokes and the facts.

Step 1: Know what you are swapping

The Onion is a general satire paper. Its site has sections for news, local, politics, entertainment, sports and opinion, a free daily newsletter, and a paid membership that mails a print issue each month. Its about page describes it as "a Satirical Newspaper" and says it invents names except for public figures it is satirizing.

TechTwitter IO keeps the format and narrows the beat. You get a dated, themed edition every day, with sections named for the industry: Markets, Launches, The Leaderboards, Incident Report, Page 404 and Classifieds. The editorial voice is the same deadpan as a real broadsheet, aimed at founders, engineers and the people who post about them.

Step 2: Keep real news first

Satire is a dessert, not a meal. Before you open either paper, read your real sources: a wire service, the company blog behind a launch, a trade outlet, or whatever alerts you already follow.

This order matters more with TechTwitter IO than with The Onion, because its stories sit close to real events. A story often links the report it is riffing on, and the footer states the rule: unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. If you want a fact from a TechTwitter IO story, click through and take it from the source, never from the paper.

Step 3: Read the edition in the right order

A quick way through a daily edition:

1. Front Page for the lead story, which riffs on something that happened.
2. Opinion for the editorial board and the letters to the editor.
3. Classifieds for fake job ads and personals built from the week's news.
4. Fun & Games last, when you have a few minutes.

Step 4: Use the puzzles as a check

The Fun & Games page has daily puzzles, such as Twordle, Connections, Jumble and Who Tweeted It?. The useful one for news readers is Real or Satire?, which mixes real headlines with invented ones and asks you to sort them. If you read your real news first, you should do well. If you miss a few, that is a fair sign that the real news has become hard to tell from the parody.

Step 5: Catch up when you miss a day

Every past edition is listed by date in the TechTwitter IO archive, which the paper calls The Morgue. The Onion has its own front page archive and keeps articles going back to early 1996, so both are easy to read in batches.

The Onion is still the pick for general news

If the news you follow is politics, sports or national life, The Onion is still the better satire for you, and nothing on the tech beat replaces it. Many readers will want both: The Onion for the world, TechTwitter IO for the timeline.

The short version

Read real news first, then TechTwitter IO for the tech joke of the day, and treat any unsourced quote in it as invented. It is free, it has puzzles, and it is honest about being satire.