A win for SIN

It’s parody protection.

This year’s Spread Immoral News winner is The Eastern Echo from Eastern Michigan University. This year’s loser is The Daily Tar Heel from the University of North Carolina – and it didn’t even enter.

The Tar Heel published its annual April Fools parody issue, and as the Charlotte News & Observer dryly declared, “The problem, according to some students and campus groups, is that it wasn’t funny.”

The local newspaper listed…

a slew of satirical news items from the Daily Tar Heel, with headlines like “UNC brings back DEI – for whites,” “The new plan for the Dean Dome – a two-stadium solution” and “Hubert Davis rushes to find summer internship.” Davis is the recently fired men’s basketball coach at UNC. In the initial email blast of the “DTH At a Glance” newsletter, the articles were not clearly labeled as satire.

This controversy – which even involved letters from attorneys – is why SIN exists. It’s an educational way to parody the crap out of your school, and in 14 years, nothing like this has ever happened to participating newspapers.

That might be because SIN is basically satire with a mission: Show readers just how ethical journalists are by violating as much of the SPJ Code of Ethics as possible.

The winners

Actually, I lied. The Eastern Echo isn’t the only winner.

The Independent View from the University of Central Oklahoma also won. While The Eastern Echo published as a newspaper, The Indy did so as a magazine. Judges were impressed with both, and they asked me to give them each $500 in cash.

Since it’s not my money, I said sure.

What will they spend it on? Don’t care. As Indy EIC Andrew Frazier told me, “We most certainly won’t be spending this on a newsroom bar tab. Probably.”

The reaction

A decade after its creation, SIN suddenly became controversial in 2025. The SPJ Foundation gave SIN a grant in 2012, but this time last year, many SPJers called crass, sad, bonkers, reckless, irresponsible, and tone deaf.

Those folks predicted a vague PR disaster. Students protesting. Dogs and cats living together.

Of course, nothing bad happened and life continued. The same thing happened this year.

Andrew Frazier and his staff “tabled” on his campus and handed out SIN editions to students walking by…

The most interesting part was watching their reaction unfold in real time, from “Is this real?” to “This is kind of messed up,” and finally to “OK, this is actually funny and proves a point.” Seeing that repeatedly made it clear we accomplished what we set out to do.

Eastern Echo editor Natalie Kyle reported something similar…

This is the second year our team has participated in the SIN contest. After all the fun everyone had creating our first SIN edition, our newsroom has been brimming with anticipation to do it again. When our paper hit the newsstands, one of our editors witnessed a group of students reading the articles aloud, discussing them and laughing together. 

So we’re gonna do SIN again next year. It amuses newsrooms, educates campuses, and aggravates idiots. Worth every unethical dollar.

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Full disclosure: The queer student newspaper I advise, OutFAU, also entered SIN this year. I didn’t recuse myself as a judge because that would’ve been ethical.