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Newspapers today are in dire straits. Circulation is dwindling, profits are plummeting and tumult besets us, the proud bulwarks of honest reportage, on all sides. Through it all we have continued to uphold the integrity with which our forebears began this paper, to bring the news as accurately as possible to as many as possible.
But sometimes doing the right thing means knowing when to accept change as well as when to resist it, and so we have decided to join the new generation of newspapers. Beginning next year, The Brown Noser will further its worldwide news dominance by adopting a miraculous invention known as movable type.
The Brown Noser is founded in a proud tradition of handwritten news. Since the paper's inception, every word of every page of every issue has been painstakingly inscribed by the quill tips of thousands of scribes, toiling continuously in the dimly lit scriptorium of The Brown Noser headquarters.
Every time a copy editor finds a typo or factual error in the issue, amending it causes the text on every page to shift slightly; the entire transcription process must then be restarted. This is why each issue, though typically containing no more than a day's worth of news, takes several months to produce.
We must recognize that we live in a society increasingly dependent on technology, and that in some important ways we have gained from it. Telescopes, for example, have proven invaluable in the long-range detection of pirates, and Mr. Edison's light-bulb is arguably not the "most wicked orb of base magicianry" that our headlines, until 1973, constantly claimed it was.
Ten years ago, some of our copy editors suggested that the printing press would save us enough money that we could afford to raise their wages from the daily sixpence they presently receive. We now concede that the printing press is a prudent economic decision, though the notion that we should allow workers to dictate their own wages, or that we should move to the newfangled decimal currency system, is of course as ridiculous now as it was then.
We know that our longtime readers have come to expect immaculate handwritten stories accompanied by photorealistic painted depictions of the day's events. But we also have a responsibility to a growing youth audience that demands immediate information, and that ultimately means we will have to drastically shorten our three-month production cycle so that we can bring people news the very week it happens.
Rest assured, our adoption of the printing press will not in any way affect the guiding principles that you have come to trust in our publication. We know our boundaries, and the printing press is where we draw the line. The Brown Noser shall not dally with daguerrotypes or type-writers. We retain our commitment to mail horses as the only reliable method of delivery and remain skeptical of both the safety and practicality of the so-called "auto-mobiles" and "aero-planes."
Hogwash, we say to almost all modern things. Today, however, we add just one exception: movable typw.
