(Image: AAP/Paul Braven)

FROM: Managing Director, News Corp

TO: All Staff

Hi all,

As you may know, our most innovative and consistently entertaining arm, the Northern Territory News, has recently successfully implemented a solution to toilet paper shortages in the Top End by including an eight-page toilet paper liftout in a recent edition.

As part of News’ constant drive for innovation and eagerness to adapt and improve in response to changing market conditions, this is to notify all staff that toilet paper liftouts will, from next week, become a regular feature of all News Corp publications across Australia.

Management has identified three ways in which this project will help enhance the News brand:

  1. By providing a practical solution to a real challenge facing readers, we will consolidate our bonds within the community and reinforce our reputation as the news organisation that cares about the everyday Aussie;
  2. By devoting 16 pages per issue to blank sheets of absorbent toilet tissue rather than “filler” news and opinion pieces, we will cut editorial costs and enable our business to be more agile and flexible in the modern marketplace;
  3. By becoming, for many Australians, the only available option for toilet paper, we will sell, forgive the expression, a shitload of hard copies, thereby returning the average News consumer to their old habit of buying the paper.

The new section will be called “News Wipe”, and will be positioned as an exciting new take on the traditional lifestyle section. Rather than telling you about your lifestyle, we’ll be facilitating your lifestyle, by providing one of the necessities of an active modern life.

(Note to all sales staff: a script elaborating on this will be provided to you shortly to use in discussions with potential subscribers or advertising clients.)

There are, obviously, challenges that will arise from the rollout of News Wipe. Again, management has divided these into three broad categories:

  1. A tendency for the more selfish and grasping 21st-century consumer to believe they are being short-changed by having 16 empty pages placed in their paper;
  2. Possible PR backlash coordinated against the company by leftist agitators making tired and slanderous “jokes” regarding News publications being “full of shit”;
  3. Potential complaints by readers of The Australian who find the News Wipe section, when delivered in broadsheet format, to present certain logistical problems.

It is therefore vital that all employees and management are united in putting in place measures to prevent these challenges detracting from the brand.

Firstly, the rollout of News Wipe will coincide with a major marketing blitz with the theme “Blank Paper is Gentler on Your Skin”. Scientific studies will be cited to prove that blank pages are of greater value than printed ones ever could be.