If You’d Like to Make a Call…

Dark days ahead at [The Big Newspaper], no question about it.

The e-mail came this morning, out of the blue: Head Honcho and Head Honcho #2, are now, uh, Headless. Their last day? You're lookin' at it, buddy.

Further consolidation had been talked about for months, and now, on the final day of the fiscal year, here it was, in all of its please-show-yourself-out-the-side-door-immediately glory.

But in the meantime… conference calls! Except that, for some reason, we can't even do that right. Reporters and editors all gathered in the conference room, poised by the speakerphone, awaiting the "big news" from our new Supreme Leader, only to discover that he was apparently addressing us from the bottom of a missile silo somewhere, and it was nigh impossible to make out his words, much less the message. Interspersed with his echo-y, static-filled droning came the endless musical doorbell chimes of other employees trying to join the call from around the chain. At times, the cacophony from the speaker more closely resembled the soundtrack of an old pinball machine than a discussion of the future of the newspapers.

I lasted about 5 minutes before giving up and going back to my desk.

Those hardy souls who stayed for the rest of the hour(!) informed me that it was all downhill from there. We're not, he said, producing the kinds of news that make readers want to buy the product, and subsequently make advertisers want to hawk their wares in our pages. Which means, I guess, that we don't have enough celebrity gossip, but I could be oversimplifying here.

Apparently, the Patch.com model of hyperlocal journalism is failing miserably. Readers don't care what's going on in their neighborhoods – or, at least, not enough to fork over 75 cents to read about it. The only answer, of course, is to go in the opposite direction and produce all regional, over-arching stories with which everybody can identify.

"The world spun on its axis today, causing dozens of people to die at various points on the globe. President Obama held a conference call with members of the G8 to address the issue."

That regional enough for ya? No. What about our extraterrestrial readers?

Luckily, the flagship of [The Big Newspaper] – which, coincidentally, is where the new Supreme Leader has held sway up until this morning – has been producing the kinds of stories that readers and advertisers do like, and with many fewer resources than the slacker, do-nothing losers who populate its sniveling, pus-filled satellite publications. Elitist snobbery being my stock in trade, I like the way Supreme Leader thinks.

And I feel 100% certain that when the layoffs come – and they will – my job is so safe you could invest your 401(k) in it.