23/6: Some of the News, None of the Funny

Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), in partnership with The Huffington Post, today launched news parody site 23/6 (the name is a play on 24/7). And just like HBO’s This Just In before it, 23/6 is destined to fail, because it’s little more than a poor man’s hybrid of The Onion and Daily Show sites.

What’s surprising is that Diller and HuffPo took more than a year to come up with this. Michael Jackson, president of programming for IAC, told The Wall Street Journal that it took time to find the right approach. Jackson goes on to tell the WSJ that 23/6 is “up-to-the-minute topical comedic reaction to news and current events.”

And yet the featured video on the homepage is Swift Kids for Truth, where children make up ludicrous lies about the candidates. It’s a parody of the Swift Boat ads…from 2004. Very up-to-the minute. (Sorry, the site doesn’t allow embeds for the video. No, wait. I’m not sorry. You don’t want to watch them, though the Bin Laden: End Credits did make me chuckle a bit.)

The New York Times makes the astute observation that Diller is the new Bill Gates, copying good ideas that are already out there. I’d go one further and say he’s even more like Gates in that he takes good ideas that are out there and drains the fun out of them.

One wonders where the sharp writers of Diller’s College Humor were during editorial meetings. Those guys are funnier and more timely than anything on 23/6.

Launching the site with less than a year to go before the election was probably done in an effort to suck up some of those sweet political ad dollars. But there are so many other faux newscasts that do it so much better, 23/6 will likely get some of the news but none of that money.