The backstory of the lead-up to the axing
Zoe, the news industry is changing so fast – PR Boss Bo Lard, CEO of the Kyiv Poster, is telling the paper’s billionaire owner and publisher Zoe Mohair – that a subhead no longer has to be longer than the headline! It’s hard to believe, it boggles the mind. Why, Zoe, if someone were to tell me that even a year ago, I would’ve laughed in their face. Traditional conventions and long-accepted practices are being overturned by the Internet with lightning speed! Soon, there ain’t gonna be no more rules whatsoever!
Bo – Zoe begins to tell his longtime confidant and advisor on the Ukrainian market – that Kyiv Poster Chief Editor Bret Boner really bugs me. He’s taken advantage of my generosity by sucking thousands of dollars in salary and other benefits a month out of my company over the years, but he hasn’t given anything back, not even a good faith effort to bring the Kyiv Poster back into the black, and after it nearly sunk during the financial crisis when I bailed it out, along with him, with my generous purchase from Seth Sundance, and then generously kept it afloat and financed it with nonstop generous infusions of generous capital, being all the time generous and generously thinking in the best interests of the paper, and not my ineffably huge industrial and business folder, in which the Kyiv Poster is just a tiny, comparatively insignificant slip of paper.
Zoe, I hear you loud and clear – says Bo.
And yet, Bo, my steadfast and loyal companion of many years on the tricky and unpredictable Ukrainian market, especially in the area of PR and image promotion, this ungrateful keyboard poker of half-baked ideals, which are completely antithetical to the business model, has done nothing but insult the integrity of my endeavors. He even dared put the paper on strike – against me! Me?!? Simply because I told him not to publish a story in the paper – my paper!!! I’d like to see anyone try to pull that anywhere on this fast-changing and ruthless market today. I’m telling you, Bo, that’s never going to happen here again!
Zoe, my good friend, who was my longtime paying business client and is now my direct employer and thus also continuing to pay me for my services in amounts similar to or greater than the consulting fees I used to bill you for – although I haven’t figured that out yet, taking inflation into account – I’m telling ya the whole news publication culture has been turned upside down; I tell ya, things have changed radically, drastically – I don’t think that’s something you’ll ever have to worry about again. The sector is shedding thousands of jobs, unable to withstand the pressure from the Internet – whatever that means. The financial crisis has –
Bo, please not to confuse fast Internet-based changes in the print media sector with the pitiless ravaging by the financial crisis of 2007-2008. For, if we are talking about firing the sexually frustrated Brent Boner, or whatever his name is, then it seems absurd to say he is the victim of the financial crisis, which has been long over, and especially when he was generously given bountiful resources of tremendous generosity to pull the paper out of the ruins left in the wake of that crisis – for five years. Five years!!! How much of a chance can anyone get – and then take that chance for granted?!? And here I am today, five years later, supporting this money-losing circus and Media Man – its chief clown. In this respect, the technological changes you talk about, which have swept over the news business at the same time as the effects of the financial crisis, have been a blessing, not a curse, and if anything, they should have helped Boner raise the paper up, not left him at a loss for what to do.
Zoe, so what you are saying is that if Bryant Boner, with his hard-on newspaper hero complex – and that Media Man costume certainly hasn’t helped him get chicks or write a profitable newspaper for you five years on – is not a victim of the financial crisis, and he’s not a victim of the technological changes sweeping the news publication sector, then he must be a victim of…
That’s right, Bo – stupidity.
Together belting out – Duuuuuhhh…!!! – Bo and Zoe do a mocking imitation of Boner, laughing really hard, even adding a little arm-pumping buffoon dance in their seats.
A fierce sudden rapping on Zoe’s office window seven stories up severely startles the interlocutors, shattering their levity, and they hear:
Heh, heh, heh-heh-heh…
They turn to look, but whatever it was has disappeared.
What was that, asks an unnerved Zoe?
I think we got ourselves a Ferret in the window, says Bo.
Filed by Jack Step, May 8, 2013