Well, I guess it’s finally time to do it, everyone. It’s been nearly two years since we started the idea of Useless News, and I’ve loved every moment of it. I created the idea with my friends Kenny and Lily Calhoun back in 2022, I thought what if we created a news company that wrote about the dumbest and most random stories but make it sound really serious and professional. And for the most part, we have stuck to that same formula. Just fun, entertaining pieces of news stories that may or may not be completely useless.
There have been 72 articles officially published on Useless News, and at some point we started uploading every other day at what I believe to be our peak from September to May. I honestly can’t believe we made it that far and created so many articles for you guys to see. Looking through them now is like visually seeing all my memories forever encased here on this website. Seeing everything written by Lily, Kane, Emma, Shelby, Helen and Dallas is wonderful because it shows that Useless News was truly a team that all worked together to bring San Andreas stories and entertainment, without one of the key members then never would have made it this far.
But those were just the writers. So many people worked in the background of our company that never got enough credit. Virgil Bogard was our main reporter and was always right there in front of the camera ready to interview anything that was remotely willing. Kenny Calhoun helped me with pictures, got me stories from callers and was right behind many of the articles.
Mick Medlin helped with a lot of the early on articles with photographs and served as our anchor at one time, he even created an article about an attempted murder on a police officer. Douglas Calhoun was my helicopter pilot for many articles and even began working as a field reporting for a few articles, especially in the From You, 7 Days Ago series. Klaas Veenstra, while he hasn’t with us for too long, began working on Hood News and contributed photographs for some of our articles along with Willam McKenzie.
Dee Calhoun helped write a few articles and even wrote two on her own. Johnathan Cox helped create all the thumbnails for Useless News, created an article with us and helped with lots of photographs. Hans Roulette joined us for a few articles towards the end serving as our reporter in the field. Timotheus Keng helped work with Lily in a few of her thumbnails and photographs for her articles.
I could never have done it all without all of you guys and I’m glad you all stuck with Useless News for so long. I’d also like to mention that Dallas Calhoun was the only person to ever get officially fired… and he was fired twice.
These people all helped out in their own way and every single bit of it was crucial to running Useless. Some of the writers really went above and beyond for Useless, specifically Lily Calhoun, Shelby Rock, Emma Payne and Kane Snyder. Lily was my main editor for all my articles, proofreading everything I wrote and rewording a lot of the passages, since I tend to use the phrases over and over without realizing, and apparently it’s bad writing? I have no clue. On top of everything she helped me with, she wrote some of the longest and most detailed articles in the state, really putting all her effort into everything she wrote. Useless News would 100% never exist without her.
Shelby Rock was behind the scenes for many articles, you’ll see her orange hair in so many of the stories I wrote, but on top of being part of many stories, she also wrote one of her own. The Chumash Spiritleaf was an original story she created for Useless News about the history of the Spiritleaf and the history on how it came to Chumash. I’ve always thought it to be in the top 5 best articles we have at Useless News and I always will.
Emma Payne was the first person we hired outside of our friend group. At first, we never planned to hire anyone else other than Edgerunners as we were afraid people may have used AI to write articles, but Emma came along and brought such a unique spin for Useless with her first article teaching how to do cow tipping, then continued with a very detailed horoscope for 2024. We were all so happy to have her with us for so long, with her writing the 2nd most articles in the whole company.
Kane Snyder moved to Los Santos back in January 2024 and immediately wanted to join Useless News as a reporter/writer. He came in and wrote four amazing articles in his first week, then disappeared from Los Santos. I’m not sure where he went, but wherever he is, I hope he knows that people loved his articles and called me on the phone just to tell me about it. Thanks Kane!
Finally, Maxine Finch. She never officially joined Useless News but her and I worked together on quite a few articles during the peak of Useless. You’ll see her mentioned on lots of my articles, in the pictures, videos or even helped write some of them. Most of it all started with “What chaos are we gonna create today?” It was so much fun running around San Andreas all the time looking for articles you, Harry and Lily.
We did everything we could to make each article better than the last. Whenever an article was released that gained attention, I would sometimes get an email, phone call or a text message from people saying nothing but positive things. I remember one time a woman could not stop laughing about something we wrote and she called just to say she enjoyed it. You guys have no idea how much this meant to all of us and is the reason we kept writing more and more. I’d really like to thank Stella Day and Erin Murphy from Weazel News for being an early supporter of Useless News and advertising us on their website. Harry Kennedy and Becks Lawson from Shout News, I really enjoyed working on stories with you guys and I heard from Maxine that you guys chuckled at a few of my articles.
Useless News was, in my mind, good. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t great, it was good. And all good things… Must come to an end. With that said, Useless News will sadly be shutting down on September 1st, 2024. You can reread all 72 of our articles up until that point on both our website and the mobile app. After that, the website will be shutting down. I’ve thought about it for quite sometime and this is the best course of action. Lily moved away a few months ago, Emma just recently moved back home. Douglas, Will, Klaas, Hans, Dallas, V, Mick, Kenny and Tim are all moving from Los Santos to Vice City for a new start for the Edgerunners, and I think I will be following them. I hope one day someone takes up the torch and creates a news company like ours, not exactly satire and not exactly serious either.
Until then…
See you Space Cowboy…
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