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There were some red faces among the editorial staff of the Room today when a leaked memo revealed that the curtailment of the incredibly popular news service was an error. "It's all the editor's fault," said an angry John Barnes, publisher and Liverpool midfielder. "No, I can't remember what his name is. Do your own research you scavenging maggots!" He screamed at terrified journalists called to an emergency press conference by the eccentric millionaire playboy publisher.
"I always used to read the news, especially the stories that had been up there since March," said one friend of the editor, who declined to be named. In response to the popular outcry, Barnes promised the news would return, albeit in a different form. "We have decided to provide a useful and honest news service," said Ben Eveling, a spokesman for the irate publishing magnate. "We will publish anything we are sent in a press release. Anything at all. If you work in PR and you've got some old tosh lying around the office, send it to us and we'll publish it."
When it was pointed that this was precisely what everyone else did, and it hardly helped distinguish the Room from any other magazine or electronic news outlet, Eveling flapped around like a fat cod impaled on a hook for a couple of seconds before replying. "Well obviously we haven't come up with anything new," he said, departing from his prepared speech. "However, unlike other publications, we will not make any pretence of actually writing a news story, we'll just bung the whole thing up verbatim, unless it's too long in which case we might cut out some of the bits that are repeated three or four times."
When asked about editorial standards, Eveling replied that the strictest standards were already in operation in the Room and that this would be stringently applied to the new News section. "Every press release we receive must be written in words, or at least with characters in a terrestrial alphabet," he said. "Otherwise we simply will not publish it."
He also talked of plans to introduce a grading system, whereby the press releases would be graded according to their relevance to the editorial mission of the Room - an ezine published exclusively on the Web. "Obviously, we'd prefer stories that had absolutely no relevance, so if someone sent us some PR gobbledegook about Massey Ferguson's plans to introduce a new model of combine harvester in the spring, we would award that a relevance rating of 98 or 99%. Whereas a press release about the latest release of JavaScript, or US Robotics new X2 extension to the V34+ standard would receive a paltry relevance rating of 3% or less." Julian Patterson was unavailable for comment.
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