Clark Kent’s First Day At The ‘Daily Planet’
By Will Sloan
Olsen! Where’s my tuna sandwich? Lane! That story should’ve been on my desk an hour ago! And you – hey you – in the glasses – waddya want, make it quick, I’m a busy man! Oh, you’re Clark Kent? The reporter from Smallville? Hmm… I expected someone a little older… Well, come in, take a seat. You want coffee? Hey Olsen! Go out’n get me two cups of coffee, black! Tell ‘em it’s for Perry White, you’ll get a deal!
Look Kent, I’ll be straight with you: a lot of people ‘round here told me not to hire you. We get Columbia grads beatin’ down our door night and day, and your diploma from Smallville High School ain’t exactly in the Ivy League. Also, we both know your résumé is flimsy. Most of our employees work their way up the ranks – student newspapers, freelance gigs, unpaid internships, community weeklies, the works — but your actual journalism experience seems to be nil. In this day and age, when J-schools across the country are pumping out more grads than this dying industry can support, why I should take a risk with some young rube from hicktown?
Well kid, it’s ‘cause I have a good feeling about you. Also, your dad is my cousin. And you’ll work cheap. But more than anything, it’s ‘cause the gatekeepers are falling in this industry, and only the quick-witted will survive. Traditional media, with its newsprint and inflated salaries and so-called “objective reporting” is a thing of the past. Here at the Daily Planet, we aspire to be more than just a news source: we’re an online, all-encompassing, multimedia aggregator, combining everything you want from the Internet into one beautiful stew. Folks don’t need to buy a newspaper just to get the scrap of information they’re looking for — we give it to them for free, in short blog posts, and with funny YouTube clips on the side. Kent, I’ve been around for a long time, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s give the people what they want. And what people want are guest contributions by celebrities about how vaccines cause autism.
Lois! Lois, this is Clark Kent — Clark Kent, Lois Lane. You two’ll be sharing an office. Lois has been here since the beginning — worked her way up from aggregating cat videos to updating our TMZ sidebar to monitoring Ted Nugent’s Twitter feed for racist outbursts. Now, she condenses long-form reportage from the Times into bullet-point listicles, and nobody does it better. By the way, Lois, that reminds me — great job on “Six Things We Learned About Lindsay Lohan and The Canyons From the New York Times Magazine Profile.” We got a lot of hits out of that one.
Great Caesar’s ghost, Lois! Don’t touch his glasses, haven’t you got any manners? Sorry, Kent – Lois thinks you look like Superman. Women, amiright? The broad’s got Superman on the brain. Say, Kent, waddya think of that “Superman” character everyone’s talking about? Me, I think he’s a wacko and a menace, but the folks on the street seem to like him, and we aim to please. See that knuckleknob over there? That’s Jimmy Olsen, one of our cub reporters — he’s in charge of embedding Superman spoof videos from CollegeHumor and Funny Or Die. He’s also putting together a list of top celebrity tweets about Superman, and is transcribing Jon Stewart’s jokes from The Daily Show for our “Late Night Superman” roundup.
By the way, when you tweet our stories, use the hashtag #DailyPlanetIsSuper.
Oh no, Kent, don’t worry, we don’t need you to get any pictures of Superman. We usually just take whatever’s on Getty Images. We don’t need you to write anything, either. We save the big stories for more seasoned professionals: we’ve got op-eds coming in from Ben Affleck, Gary Hart, and Donald Trump. No, we’re going to start you off on the celebrities beat. Here’s the number for the editor of Egotastic — talk to him, and he’ll send you some sideboob shots of actresses at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. I need you to put those into a slideshow by three o’clock at the latest. Can you do that for me, Kent?
Kent, you look glum. I keep forgetting you’ve never worked in a newsroom before. Look, I know I said the industry’s dying, but that’s not really true – it’s just in transition. Here at the Daily Planet, we’ve used social media savvy, search engine optimization, and a good, old-fashioned populist appeal to revolutionize the way people consume news. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Kent, but we’re the dog who’s gonna come out on top.
So keep your chin up, kid, and get to work on the sideboob piece, because after that, I need you to do a list of the top nude scenes from Californication, and a blog about Kim Kardashian’s cameltoe. And Kent, just one more thing: the position is unpaid.