a story Wednesday announcing that , after 188 years as a print publication , it will become the first newspaper to deliver news exclusively via Twitter . Twitter , a micro-blogging site , allows users to post updates that are 140 characters long . In keeping with the limitation , the newspaper said it had undertaken a mammoth project to retool the newspaper 's entire archive . For example , Charles Lindbergh 's 1927 flight from New York to Paris , France , was condensed to : `` OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow , pretty cool ! Boring day otherwise ... sigh . '' The news is n't always black and white . The Taipei Times , one of three English-language dailies in Taiwan , fooled many readers with a report that two pandas donated by China to the Taipei Zoo were , in fact , brown forest bears dyed black and white . To render a whiff of authenticity to the story , editors made a reference to China 's tainted-milk scandal that sickened 300,000 people last year . But the story contained enough outrageous lines to clue in readers . Among them , a quote from
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- If you happen to browse upon a news story that 's too odd to be true Wednesday , hold your outrage and check the calendar . A Lebanese newspaper ran a caricature last year of two opposition leaders hugging in light of April Fools ' Day . It 's April Fools ' Day -- when media outlets around the world take a break from the serious business of delivering news and play fast and furious with the facts . No one quite knows when the practice began , but any journalist will point to what is undoubtedly the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled : A 1957 BBC report that said , thanks to a mild winter and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil , Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop . The segment was accompanied by pictures of farmers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees -- and prompted hundreds of viewers to call in , wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees . While not as elaborate , the pranks that media outlets harvested this year have been quite rich : The Guardian in London ran