# Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet

Russell Frank defines newslore as folklore that comments on, and is therefore indecipherable without knowledge of, current events. Newslore takes multiple forms: jokes; urban legends; digitally altered photographs; mock news stories, press releases or interoffice memoranda; parodies of songs, poems, political and commercial advertisements and movie previews and posters; still or animated cartoons and short live-action films. Such material, he argues in his new book Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), can teach us more about how "ordinary Americans" responded to such events as the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, corporate malfeasance scandals, and the deaths of celebrities than we can learn from the news media.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2011
- By: American Folklife Center
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2021688720/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2021688720?play=1)