Dark Day

It was a dark day today, the likes of which Wapping has not seen since moving from Fleet Street.

A number of papers were out on strike, many journalists have merely just given up on the profession in favour of less demanding work. Strikes throughout the industry have not only left media empires in tatters but left certain minor celebs resorting to shock tactics just to get a bit of attention, it was reporte- no sorry, wrong term in this environment... it was rumoured that certain celebs had even resorted to selling holiday photos just to get column inches.

How different was today's events from the brave new dawn of six months ago, when a whole new dawn was reported from within the walls of that noble institution The Daily Star. Managing Directors had explored various new strategies based upon opportunities afforded by the new e-generation. Management Consultants Slaughtered and Poor had been brought in to advise on brave new methods.

A nine month feasibility study had revealed an opening that would save the publication huge amounts of money, while also targeting their key demographic market. It was decided that to stave off redundancies and save printing costs the paper would adopt the now ubiquitous language of the text message.

S+P: Management Consultants

FREDDIE * 8 MY HAM*

The S+P report had highlighted the 15-19 year old market as their key customers and pointed out that text messages out weighed face to face communication by 70% and so initially they took the radical step of changing their name to The *. Key indicators showed that column inches saved by that now defunct practice, grammar would save the company thousands, while doing away with that time consuming practice of using vowels would stave off the receivers for a number of months.

Promising

Initial results were promising, after changing their name all staff were sent on 'txt as a foron langwaj' courses and the transition to text language was relatively smooth. The stories-per-page ratio rocketed, while the news-per-ink index went through the roof. Sales amongst the A1 teen market went up and it was claimed that it helped the older generation get in touch with the new world of multimedia communications.

A number of publications quickly followed suit, Hello became LO and it looked like the tactic would be a monumental development when the TV presenter of changing rooms changed her name by deed poll to 'Carole :-)'.

There were notable mistakes however, as there inevitably would be, for instance, after an acrimonious split that previous chart topper S club 7 became ESS club Four, and the FT became 'The Financial Times of London'.

However on the whole the outlook was rosy. Slaughtered and Poor heralded their success, their share price rocketed and they set about an expansion programme that would be the envy of all their competitors.

It was missed by their analysts but the first rumblings of discontent arose from television adopting this increasing trend. After successfully adopting the text message strategy Countdown had grabbed the valuable 5-6pm slot with their brand extension 'cntdn'.

This saw a radical change to the programme by replacing vowels with numbers such as 2,4 and 8, while also introducing symbols such as ; and ) to add to the word power of the contestants (not to mention the hilarity).

Rich W: LMAO

Discontent

The first signs of discontent came when a contestant tried the symbol )-; and claimed it was an unhappy Australian, the ensuing fight harmed ratings greatly but was nothing compared to the incident when a competitor came up with (.)(.) and Richard Whitely (now known as Rich W) had to have the symbol explained before the watershed.

Producers moved quickly to limit the damage however with hindsight reintroducing the U into the title of Cntdn was a disastrous move and then calling it Cntdn;-) helped not a bit.

It was at this point that the rumblings of discontent had started to appear in the newspapers. Journalists were complaining they could not produce the amount of news required for the new language, after all where as 6 months ago they only had to produce one story per half page, they now had to produce 1 story per 4 inches of news space.

Dave Clifford, Senior Journalist at The Sun claimed, 'there just isn't that much news for us to comment on. Gone are the days where a journo could camp outside a stars house for an 8 hour shift, go through their rubbish and come back with a scoop. Nowadays they must do a 10 hour shift just for a headline, let alone the story itself.'

This journalist will keep you up to date and informed in the developments of this story as I feel there are many developments to come, however if you subscribe to my messenger service on your Completely Remote Access Protocol phone I can keep U in4med in a multimedia, streaming, real time fashion.¹

¹ You must have a CRAP-enabled phone to subscibe to this service.