Category Archives: Media

BBC outsources tech news to Microsoft

NO MICROSOFT WAY, WebTV Centre,Wednesday (MSBBC) — Microsoft has unveiled new technology that will allow the BBC to completely outsource its technology news section to Microsoft.

Microsoft altered head photoThis cements an informal relationship that has been in place since BBC News slimmed down surplus staff such as subeditors, proofreaders or most of the journalists. “Tech news is a brutally competitive area,” said Ashley Highfield of Microsoft, formerly of the BBC. “It’s a race against time to be first with the rewrite of the press release. I must point out, by the way, that my current job is in no way related to the Microsoft-based technology I put in place when I worked for the BBC.”

The new technology will automatically pull in Microsoft press releases, add grammatical errors, talk down to the reader, substitute technical terms with inaccurate synonyms and then misspell them and put them in quotation marks. Articles will be padded with analyst quotes computer-generated by an expert system describing how Google will destroy rainforests and Apple phones cost too much.

Recent output includes articles on Microsoft’s Zune, Microsoft’s collaboration with Nokia, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s copy of the Nintendo Wii controller, Microsoft suing Windows pirates in China, long articles on Bill Gates’ charitable foundation and medical evidence that Google causes cancer.

The system is guaranteed robust. “In fact, we’re running it on a refurbished Xbox,” said Highfield. “Absolutely nothing can go wr E74 ◉ ◉ ◉

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Murdoch’s London freesheet closes

PAGE 3, Channel 5, Friday (Mediocre Grauniad) — The collapse of Murdoch evening freesheet The London Paper has thrown the vapid fishwrap industry into turmoil.

Rupert Murdoch as GollumNews Group Newspapers had already been reeling under the impact of even a 20p Sun only being bought by people too thick even for Metro. “Celebrities!” said London Paper editor Stefano Hatfield. “Train strikes! Viagra ice cream at Selfridges! Half-naked black women as well as white ones! Science from the University of That’s A Bit Bloody Convenient! Politely-phrased middle-class suburban fascism, none of your unsubtle Daily Mail-isms! Not even the Em cartoon was enough! What did we miss?”

The paper will be much-missed by the Lumber Cartel and the binmen division of Unite. The London Paper single-handedly made up a quarter of all the rubbish in the streets of Westminster and low-cost housing was under construction using remaindered copies of City Boy.

The London Paper could move behind the News Group paywall. “It works for the Wall Street Journal! There’s got to be a fantastic market for bad fashion, annoying non-celebrities, tedious City non-gossip, gay dating non-tips and indisputable scientific proof from cosmic ray measurements that women need to drink like fish and bathe in semen to grow and uplift their breasts and succeed in business. ‘Down-load’ it to your iTouch Kindle 360 today!”

“You’ll never go broke underestimating public taste,” said Rupert Murdoch, fresh from the triumpant news that MySpace had lost $500 million in value since he bought it. “Well, usually.”

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Women urged by marketer to test for fertility

WAKEFIELD, Sheffield, Sunday (NNN) — Britain is facing an infertility timebomb, according to Professor Bill Ledger of Sheffield University, who just happens to have a side business, Biofusion plc t/a Lifestyle Choices, selling fertility tests, in the Observer yesterday.

Pregnant chavette smoking“Couples are sticking their heads in the sand,” he said. “Thirty-year-old women should take a ‘fertility MoT.’ Fortunately, I have some right here — a snip at a hundred quid a go. If the NHS won’t buy them from me, it could cause a devastating drop in national fertility!”

If necessary, women could then opt for a £200-300 ultrasound scan to look for other problems. “We do a nice line in those too.”

The call by Professor Ledger followed a week in which fertility dominated the news, with stories about postcode lotteries for those seeking IVF treatment. “My marketing director tells me this is completely coincidental. As medical technology suppliers of unimpeachable ethics, I’m sure we wouldn’t run a huge press campaign or features in Elsevier journals or anything.”

Professor Ledger is also a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the completely independent government regulator. “So who could you trust more than us? It’s almost an official endorsement! Except the bit where they negligently don’t give us money. That needs addressing.”

Professor Ledger also said that an education programme should be introduced in secondary and primary schools. “We can help with that too, at quite reasonable rates. Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe, but that’s no reason to be complacent! Besides, chavs don’t have any money to pay us directly.”

Jordan gets her end in

OOMPA LOOMPA VILLAGE, Silicone Valley, Sunday (News of the Screws) — Katie “Jordan” Price took HUNKY television cage fighter Alex Reid back to her hotel suite for a night of WILD SEX, according to a press release issued last night, hours after her previous press release denying they were together.

Breasts and their JordanAccording to the attached script, the GLAMOUR girl enjoyed her night of PASSION in a suite at Liverpool’s Malmaison Hotel with Reid on Thursday, with stage directions to emerge at lunchtime the following day grinning from ear to ear.

“They were all over each other earlier in the night,” said an anonymous source at her publicist. The night of LUST could be heard by fellow hotel guests, though some questioned the MOANING apparently replaying on a five-minute loop.

When she emerged from her ROMP, she was half an hour late for a signing session for her new novel Cubic Zirconia. After fifteen minutes’ patient explanation of which end of a pen was which, the ghost writer who did the actual writing sat down to do the signing as well.

Just over an hour later they left and headed to The Circle private members’ club where Jordan FELT Alex up, necked vodka from the bottle, accidentally neglected to expose her NIPPLES for minutes at a time and collapsed in a shambolic heap after a LESBIAN snog.

Estranged husband Peter Andre says he is “shocked and appalled. There’s actually someone more vacuous than me in the world, and I married her. Bloody hell.”

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Michael Jackson “news value missing” at autopsy

CHILLER, Off The Perch Saturday (N! News) — Michael Jackson’s news value was missing at his autopsy, it was claimed last night. The front pages of all newspapers today showed a hole where an actual news story should have been.

Michael Jackson as a zombie in “Thriller”A witness claimed to have seen Jackson’s news story on an editor’s desk, saying: “The prosthesis the journalists normally attached to their damaged story was missing, revealing bits of tasteless synthetic papier-maché surrounding a small dark hole.”

It is believed that journalists “squeezing Jackson until the pips rattled” had so destroyed the 50-year-old’s newsworthiness that even Daily Mail readers thought their paper was going beyond the pale and perhaps, as famous as he was, the poor fellow could probably be left to rest in peace now.

“But we can probably tie in Katie Price’s breasts if we try,” said one contestant for a completely synthetic Pulitzer, “so to speak. Swine flu should be in there too, it’s pretty popular at the moment. Gotta rack up those web hits! From those thieving bastards at Google.”

Jackson’s personal doctor is now an official manslaughter suspect over his death, utterly reliable celebrity gossip sites have revealed. A toxicology report on Jackson’s body is set to be released next week, by which time this week’s baseless speculations as to his doctor, his children, his brothers and Elvis’ passing UFO will be completely forgotten in time for another “full house” of identical front pages on every paper in Britain.

Minister praises high standard of science journalism

WELL I NEVER, Do-As-You-Please, Wednesday (NotScientist) — The minister for science and innovation, Lord Paul Drayson, has praised the high standards of science journalism at the sixth World Conference of Science Journalists in London yesterday. About 900 delegates attended the conference to congratulate each other on the remarkable quality of their press release transcription skills.

Jerry Lewis and Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor“The public relies on dependable science journalism to understand the forces shaping the modern world,” said Lord Drayson. “Your work covering the things that really matter, such as pseudo-evolutionary explanations of current fashion trends, what will give us cancer this week, scaring the crap out of people over the MMR vaccine so their kids die of birth defects from measles instead and why fellatio is required for female health helps people make important choices about their lives and builds a vital gap between scientists and the public. I mean bridge.”

He dismissed claims that typical science reporting primarily results in sensationalist and misleading headlines. “I wish more journalists would follow your example. The ones covering MPs’ expenses certainly should have been working the way you do.”

The speech was delivered to a backdrop of A-level students in lab coats. And bikinis.

Professor Gene Hunt of the University of Metro calculated that Lord Drayson’s speech could power all of Britain for six months purely from harnessing the steam coming out of Ben Goldacre’s ears.

Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone

WIKICITIES, Helmand, Monday (NNN) — The kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Rohde in Afghanistan was suppressed not only by almost all press syndicates but also by Wikipedia, on the direct command-and-control orders of Jimbo Wales, who is personally responsible for every word in the popular web-based encyclopedia.

Bouncy Wikipedia logoConservative commentators were appalled at the suppression. “Would they have protected HITLER like this?” thundered Michelle Malkin. Wales pointed out that the encyclopedia’s biography of Hitler had already been appropriately edited and cited per the Biographies of Living Persons policy:

Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany[citation needed]. He is noted[citation needed] for his work on the moral fibre of German society[citation needed] and stimulating the economy[citation needed], notably through the Autobahn construction programme[citation needed]. Some[who?] have criticized aspects of his policies[citation needed].

The Wikipedia Review message board exploded in outrage at the revelations. “And they called us conspiracy theorists!” said ardent Wikipedia critic, businessman and banned editor Gregory Kohs. “It’s not clear yet how this will make money for Wales’ private company Wikia, but I know that’s why he did it.”

The message board was further outraged at being scooped on the news. “This makes David Rohde part of the ‘hive mind,’ so the only way to remedy Wikipedia’s revelations of not revealing someone’s personal details in this particular case will be for me to put up David Rohde’s home address, names of his entire family and his bank account details on my website,” said public interest stalker Daniel Brandt. “I bet Google’s in on it too. They put a radio in my head, you know.”

“This raises many deep questions,” said free speech crusader Seth Finkelstein, “and it is important that many people keep at Wikimedia to get the truth, since they censoriously killfiled my email and viciously claimed to my editor at the Guardian that printing the stuff I write in blogs and letters to people’s employers in a mainstream British newspaper would constitute ‘deliberate malicious libel.’ I shall, of course, continue to pursue them to the end of time. Particularly that Godwin asshole.”

Many Wikipedia editors were also concerned. “Keeping details out of a Wikipedia article on a living person just because there aren’t any reliable sources because of a censorious conspiracy to keep him from getting killed is a slippery slope to the destruction of the trustworthiness and usefulness of every article in the encyclopedia,” said administrator WikiFiddler451. “People are seriously suggesting that our rules should be applied using common sense and a clue. I just don’t see how that could possibly work. Next they’ll suggest we ‘assume good faith’ or something.”

The Wikipedia Vandalism Patrol, who Wales ordered to suppress the information, deals with bad Wikipedia edits by determining if it is easier to fix the vandalism or adjust reality to the claimed facts. Wikipedia resets reality to match its contents using “wikiality,” discovered by conservative commentator Stephen Colbert. “Stephen’s one of our great successes,” said Wales. “We wrote that he was only parodying actual conservative commentators, and the liberals believed it! Of course, conservatives weren’t fooled by anything in Wikipedia.” Wikiality uses a “reality distortion field” similar to that used by Steve Jobs in his MacWorld keynote addresses, which is why all Wikimedia Foundation employees use MacBooks.

All information in Wikipedia must be verifiable in reliable sources. The “No Original Research” policy was first instituted to deal with “physics cranks. After the first few times the universe collapsed into a black hole when one of them squared the circle and we had to revert to the previous revision of reality. Way too much work. Brion was still a volunteer then, too.”

The death of Michael Jackson proved particularly problematic, with the article quickly becoming both the most read and most edited of the past week. “It took a while to decide what should have happened. ‘Heart failure’ covers a lot of stuff. The real story — the original real story, before we got in there and fixed things … no, you really don’t want to know. David Icke doesn’t want to know either, though he thinks he does. Really. No. Things are much better now. Trust us.”

Fear of Microsoft Bob Hope grips Google

WAGGENER EDSTROM, Portland, Sunday (NNGadget) — Sergey Brin of Google is “deeply rattled” by the launch of Microsoft’s Bob Hope search engine, according to a scoop printed in the New York Post, courtesy Microsoft public relations.

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in “Road to Bali”“New search engines have come and gone in the past ten years, but Bob Hope really has Sergey just crapping himself,” said one anonymous insider, “Steve B.”

“It’s clear that Google is headed down, down, down,” said another anonymous source, “Rupert M.” “Particularly the news operation. Print that or I fire you.”

Bob Hope has been warmly greeted by analysts, critics, tech journalists and others on Microsoft and News Corporation’s payrolls. Early statistics show Bob Hope increasing Microsoft’s market share by two percentage points, to about 11 percent! Before dropping back to statistical noise a few hours after the launch was over.

Google’s credibility was shot to pieces by its blatant pro-Obama bias, noted by Fox News analysts when they couldn’t find evidence of Obama’s French citizenship and gay marriage on the search engine in the days before the 2008 Presidential election. “Their far-left liberal search algorithms will lead to their utter defeat by the business-friendly Microsoft Bob Hope,” said swivel_eyed_loon_643 in the New York Post comments section. In addition, a hilariously pathetic PR placement of a story in the New York Post to hype Bob Hope sealed Google’s fate, conclusively and utterly.

A spokesman for Google, asked about the threat of Microsoft Bob Hope, said “what??”, put the phone down and laughed for five minutes before the line cut out, obviously overcome with hysterical horror.

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English acquires its millionth word: “bollocks”

GOSH, Well I never, Thursday (NNN) — English has now acquired its millionth word, “bollocks,” according to Global Language Monitor, a website monitoring the extraordinary emergence of new English throughout the world.

Media bollocks“The Million Word milestone brings to notice the coming of age of English as the first truly global language,” said Paul J.J. Payack. “We looked at slang, word-marriages with other languages and the thousands of new terms spawned by the internet. But really, most of them were such utter bollocks that it was the only reasonable candidate.”

“Bollocks” has a long and venerable history, first showing up in the 12th century. “But it keeps reviving itself. ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘n00b,’ ‘Jade Goody,’ ‘festering fucknugget’ … it’s all bollocks.”

Global Language Monitor uses a Predictive Quantities Indicator to assess whether a usage qualifies as a word: each contender is analysed according to depth (number of citations) and breadth (geographic extent of word usage), as well as the number of times a word has appeared in the global print and electronic media, the Internet, blogs, and social media. Then they throw away the numbers, get blind drunk on White Lightning while shouting the most appalling bits of the Daily Mail at each other and declare it all a load of “bollocks.”

“People moan about the degradation and decline of the English language,” said Mr Payack, “but the worst offenders are the media, who will print any old self-promoting rubbish that will fill space and save them working for a living. Global Language Monitoring is me and my invisible mate Charlie who lives on this bench with me. Bollocks to the lot of yer! Bollocks! They put a bollocks radio in my head! Bollocking bollocks!”

Murdoch: the free Internet is over

ISENGARD, Wapping, Monday (NNN) — Rupert Murdoch, speaking out on the news business, stated today that “the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don’t make enough money from it.”

Rupert Murdoch as GollumMedia commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. “How can we hold governments’ feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?” Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.

Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.

“We have to educate people that free doesn’t work, particularly for us,” said Vanessa Thorpe of the Guardian Media Group. “I tried an advertorial repeating several times that nothing will be free any more, to magic it into happening. I also subtly implied the Pirate Bay were Nazis — HITLER! HITLER! HITLER! — so we’ll see if we can make that one fly too.”

Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its “fair share” for so parasitically leading people to newspapers’ websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. “We feel this is completely unfair,” said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, “as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss.” Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.

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