Dave Barry, Portland Oregonian, and The Register-Sphincters

[sleepyjeff]

http://jewishworldreview.com/dave/barry.php3

For some reason after I read this I thought of LoT

The earliest known newspaper, published in Rome, was called Acta Diurna (literally, the Portland Oregonian). The first issue offered coverage of Roman politics ("Strom Thurmond Elected to Senate"); science news ("Study Shows Thunder Is Actually Gods Burping"); and an early episode of the comic strip "Nancy," in which Sluggo tries to avoid paying admission to the Colosseum by peeking through a knothole, and gets a spear through the eyeball. Unfortunately, Acta Diurna was not profitable, because every copy had to be entirely handwritten by slaves (called "reporters"); if a big story broke, a huge, hairy man (the "editor") would yell, "Stop the presses!" and whack them with a club.



The newspaper industry spread to America, where, by the 20th century, virtually every town had a locally owned newspaper with a name like The Chronic Prevaricator or The Register-Sphincter....

But in the past few decades, all of these newspapers were purchased by large corporations, which were in turn purchased by larger corporations, and so on, so that today the entire American newspaper industry has been glommed together into one giant media conglomerate owned by Wall Street, which frankly does not care what your City Council did. What Wall Street cares about is profits. Here at the newspaper, we get hourly phone calls from Wall Street.


"Send more profits!" Wall Street shouts, then slams down the receiver.



So the "bottom line" is that we've had to cut costs. Here are some of the ways we're doing this:


RECYCLING STORIES: To avoid the expense of writing a new story, we're rerunning earlier ones. For example, every day for the past five years, we've run the same story on fighting in the Middle East ("Middle East Fighting Again").


STAFF CUTBACKS: The typical newspaper staff has been reduced to one editor, one managing editor, 14 assistant managing editors, 39 deputy assistant managing editors and one reporter. The editors spend their days holding meetings to think of new ways to cut costs, while the reporter (who, for budgetary reasons, is not allowed to leave the building) looks out the window, in case news occurs in the parking lot.


PRODUCT PLACEMENT: You're going to see more sentences like this one, from a recent front-page story in The Philadelphia Inquirer: "'We are seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons against China,' stated President Bush, who then took a long sip from a refreshing, ice-cold Diet Pepsi."

Read the whole thing at the link above