BAD FRONT-PAGE NEWS! - by gene weingarten - The Gene Pool
BAD FRONT-PAGE NEWS!
Jun 24, 2026
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Concept by Joel Achenbach, first appearing in The Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine in 1989. Redrawn here by ChatGPT.
TO: Ed Woods, Vice President & Chief Revenue Officer, The New York Daily News
RE: Sale of your front page.
I am writing today to congratulate you on your advertising coup this week, selling your front page to an advertiser. I don’t believe this has ever been done before. What moxie! I know your corporate boss — Alden Global Capital, the giant hedge fund that buys newspapers and then rapes them for profit — must be proud.
Here’s a photo of your achievement, a wraparound ad for a Congressional candidate that is designed to look exactly like your front page. This is what beckoned readers on the newsstands:
The ad was paid for by Anthropic, the AI company infamous for having to settle a lawsuit accusing it of stealing the written word. The candidate looks favorably on AI. The disclaimer that this was an ad was unreadably tiny. The staff of your newspaper, represented by their union, declared themselves “mortified.”
But, hell, that’s just yesterday’s news. We’re in a bold new world of corporate avarice, and other opportunities await. Here are some other actions you might consider to help your bottom line:
- Auction off being quoted as an “expert” in the topic or topics of one’s choice.
- Rent out your delivery trucks to suicide bombers. Get payment up front. Collect on insurance. Win-win!
- Sell the job of restaurant critic to the highest bidder.
- Sell your daily number of digital log-ins — which is updated every day but unpredictable and otherwise unavailable — to the Mafia, to run a numbers racket that suckers will trust.
- Manipulate horoscopes to encourage certain kinds of stock purchases, moving the Dow up and down, after your newspaper has made the appropriate bets.
- Do the same sort of thing in the Kalshi predictions market. Bet on what your front-page headline will be the next day.
- Sell the services of your investigative reporting team to potential blackmailers.
- Allow celebs to buy suckuppy profiles of themselves by a staff writer of their choice.
- Allow politicians to buy profiles that savage their opponents.
- Ask your better-looking staffers to become prostitutes and gigolos. Your company can be their pimp, taking a 40 percent cut. Your execs can even dress like this.
—
Anyway, that’s it. Please feel free to use my ideas without charge. Hell, you’d steal them anyway.
By the way, as you know, Alex Bores lost last night. That’s not good for your business model. It will look like your sellout didn’t work for the client. Should this opportunity arise in the future, consider doing what you can to also rig the election.
Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
I am going to ask a question that I have asked twice before, because the change in numbers have so far been enlightening.
What do you now think the odds are than Donald Trump will finish out his current term?
- Close to 100 percent
- 75-90 percent
- 50-89
- 25-49
- Under 25
659 VOTES · 2 DAYS REMAINING
And finally:
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