Newspaper Industry Discovers New Revenue Scheme

 

In an attempt to halt their ever-increasing decline because of competition from the web, and its culture of freely-available content, the newspaper industry has recently been seeking some new form of revenue. After doubts were expressed over whether Rupert Murdoch’s paywall ideas would work in practice, other newspaper owners have been searching hard to find some other way to keep themselves in the yachts, liberally peppered with the mellow-thighed and scantily-clad bimbos, they regard as an essential requisite for the modern media mogul.

Yesterday, the reclusive Grimm Brothers, owners of The Daily Timewarp, announced that they had discovered what could become a very lucrative revenue scheme for the newspaper industry.

As the brothers said in their press release:

Earlier today, at a loose end, we decided to actually read The Daily Timewarp for the first time since our accountants suggested we buy it. Then, after our butler had woken us up again, we decided to have a look at some of our competitor newspapers, as well as The Daily Paranoia, where we discovered this article, which enabled us to come up with our solution to the newspaper industry’s financial problems.

From our researches, apparently, it seems that these days most, if not all, newspaper articles are little more than regurgitated press releases, or – as in the case of the article we mention above – based around one of those faux surveys that brands commission solely to get themselves in the newspapers.

Obviously, to us, it seems that this is little more than advertising. So, in future – and we hope that all other newspapers and media organisations will join us in this – we will charge our standard advertising rates for all such press releases and fake surveys that we print for these brands.

Not only will we, therefore, receive significant income from these brands, we can also get rid of the so-called journalists who just seem to spend their entire working days re-writing these press releases for our newspapers.

However, journalists were quick to condemn the plan, with a spokeswoman for the NUJ, saying:

It’s not our fault than modern newspapers are mostly just recycled press releases, we’d all like to be proper journalists, out there on the street, getting the stories, but sometimes it is dark… and cold out there. It’s much nicer sitting in a warm office tarting up our Facespace profiles and emailing internet porn to each other while we wait for the press releases to come in.

Anyway, turning those press releases and junk surveys into newspaper articles is highly skilled job, sometimes you need to actually type some words… and that punctuation stuff… in-between the bits you cute and paste from the survey.

Unfortunately, the plan may be doomed to failure before it even gets off the ground. As one Public Relations executive from a company specialising in such PR releases and dodgy surveys said:

Sod that, then. We’ll just bung whatever we want to flog into the middle of some video featuring cute kittens doing something funny and upload it to YouTube and the punters will go wild sending it to each other without us having to pay anyone a single penny. Sorted.