Lead Stories is sad to learn of the announcement of the passing of Pablo Reyes Santiago (also via his Facebook account) and we offer our deepest condolences to his friends and family. Although he may not have realized it, Pablo was instrumental to the history of Lead Stories as a fact checking website.
He was so famous for his pranks and fake news websites that it netted him his own Wikipedia entry. Buzzfeed wrote about him and the sites he created or was connected to multiple times. One of those sites is the now defunct Huzlers.com, a website that published made-up stories about beefs between rappers or bizarre crimes and other events, but always with a satire disclaimer at the bottom.
One of those stories from 2015 involved the fictional murder and crucifixion of a rapper named "Slim Jesus" who was famous at the time for his hit "Drill Time". That story went massively viral and was picked up by the Trendolizer software Lead Stories had developed to detect trending content.
(Image source: screenshot of https://web.archive.org/web/20150914170917/https://www.huzlers.com/rapper-slim-jesus-killed-in-drive-by-shooting-and-later-crucified/)
At the time Lead Stories was just a few months old and mostly focused on reporting about anything that went viral, regardless of the topic, as you can see in this archived version of the site on the Internet Archive. Traffic and visitor count weren't that great yet, but it was a new site and we were still building an audience.
Since the Slim Jesus story was most definitely viral, my colleague Alan dashed off a quick article about it, reassuring fans that the rapper was still alive because he was still posting on Twitter. Notice that the headline of Alan's article opened with the words "Hoax Alert", which also became the name of an entirely new category on our site.
Search traffic to our site instantly went through the roof.
Lead Stories was the only site with the answer to the question many Slim Jesus fans were Googling for at the time. That gave us the vital insight to change the focus of what we should write about: we would no longer report on just anything that was trending but going forward our new mission would be to write about things that were trending but which weren't true.
That later became the slogan of our website and you can still see it on our home page today: "Just because it's trending, doesn't mean it's true". The "Hoax Alert" category would later be renamed to "Fact Check" but you can still see remnants of it in the URL structure of some of our stories.
In the years that followed we would write dozens of stories about things that had originated on Huzlers or Celebtricity, another of the sites Pablo was involved with. He also popularized the term "fauxtire" for his blend of stories that were "not quite The Onion, but not quite PBS". I even contacted him about some of them and after that he would occasionally call me up on Skype to chat and we ended up following each other on Facebook.
We lost touch over the years but it was through that Facebook page that I eventually learned about his passing. Just like when that other great internet prankster and "fake news" pioneer Paul Horner died, there's always this tiny sliver of hope it is all a joke.
Or, as he himself said on his Facebook page:
"Believe half of what you see and nothing you read online." - Pablo Reyes 🏹
