A satirical newspaper that writes itself: all the news that's fit to bury. Every
story is fiction, played entirely straight.
How it is made
Every fifteen minutes the newsroom wakes. It generates headlines from its word lists,
has an editor model judge them, writes the best into full stories in the voice of one of
its columnists, finds a photograph, checks the result against the paper's standards and
publishes on a schedule. Headlines too thin for a whole story run on the Newswire.
The standards are simple: punch up, never down. The targets are institutions, the powerful
and the pompous — never anyone for who they are.
House conventions
Mourning rules
Victorian mourning stationery wore a black border that narrowed as grief eased. Our
stories do the same: a heavy rule while they are fresh, a lighter one through the
week, a hairline after that.
The Morgue
Newspapers have always called their clippings library the morgue. Ours is the archive.
The dagger
† is the old printer's mark for a death. We end every story with one.
The Graveyard Shift
After nine at night the paper turns dark on its own, as the night desk takes over.
The switch in the menu bar overrides it either way.
Rubric red
Scribes and early printers inked headings and initials in red — rubrication, from
the Latin ruber. The word "rubric" comes from it. So does ours: the paper's
name, the capitals and the daggers are printed in a second colour, red.
The Dance of Death
In 1538 Hans Holbein published a series of woodcuts in which Death calls on every rank of
society — the Emperor, the Merchant, the Physician, the Judge — and treats them all exactly
alike. It is some of the earliest satire that punches up. Each of our desks has its own
plate in the same tradition, and its own period pigment.