Saint John — New Brunswick’s favourite and only print-media outlet, Brunswick News Inc., is finalizing a master plan to slowly stop publishing news or human interest stories, and to just sell advertising space to businesses at home and abroad in a bid to save precious dollars.
“The transition will be seamless,” said beloved media mogul and journalist par excellence Jamie Irving at a press conference this morning in Brunswick Square. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll cut one news story a day, and fill it with an advertorial crafted by one of our 2 talented writers.” Irving went on to explain to the clueless CBC reporters in attendance that an advertorial is a story that reads as news, but is in fact an ad. “Where we used to have maybe 2 or 3 of those a month in each paper, soon it will be around 20 or 30 per day. They look like news, so no one will even notice.
“In about a month, after we’re running only advertorials, we’ll swap one of these out per day in favour of a straight-up, big-ass advertisement for Toyota or Budweiser or something.”
A reporter in the crowd meekly raised his hand to ask Irving whether the papers will still be divided into sections for different types of news. “Heck, yeah!” thundered Irving. “It’s not like we’re going to stop being journalists; we’re just going to stop actually printing stories, which has really become a formality at this point. For example, what was the ‘arts’ section will now be coupons for Michaels Arts & Crafts stores. The former ‘sports’ section will be flyers for Sportchek or Cleve’s. I’m sure you get the idea.”
The plan comes in response to a continuous and steep decline in sales of physical papers. “People in New Brunswick used to subscribe to the real, printed newspaper and have it delivered daily,” explained Irving. “They’ve stopped doing this, and we have literally no idea why. I think the quality of the writing has gone up, if anything — all we had to do was fire almost everyone, and the few who remained thought ‘I’d better pull up my socks and create some quality material, or I’ll be fired too.’ I’ve always found fear to be a great motivator.
“Anyway, people in this province would be stupid not to buy the printed paper — think of the savings they’d miss out on! Seventy cents off paper towel at Superstore! A dollar off ground pork at Giant Tiger! Ten percent off your next oil change!” Irving then disappeared in a thick cloud of coupons shot out of the Irving CouponCannon™.
Brunswick News Inc. also plans to rebrand itself as “Brun$wick Deal$.”