How Headline Writers Create News

You have to hand it to the tabloid headline writers at the New York Post: They know nothing if not how to turn the tiniest spark into a five-alarm conflagration.

By Paul McNamara

PAGE 2

A college student's 40-page term paper is 20 pages short and due today. Would he or she (not your child, of course) pay $3.95 — plus self-respect — for more time?

The operator of a site called Corrupted-Files.com says he's taking orders daily: $3.95 gets you a corrupted Word, Excel or PowerPoint file. The owner then submits it in the hope that the professor won't discover "the problem" for a few days, by which time the real paper should be done.

While not exactly the Oprah seal of approval, Corrupted-Files.com was recently featured on the New York Times Web site, making its homepage plea to "Keep this site a secret" more meaningless than cheeky. Moreover, the site is already on the radar of academia as yet another easy way out for the less-than-diligent crowd.

I sent the operator of Corrupted-Files.com a number of questions both via e-mail and the site's Web form.

I didn't get a reply … not even a corrupted one.

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