Media

DON’T BADGER ME: Saturday Age’s inauspicious celebration of its “re-birth”

The Saturday Age is “relaunching” tomorrow. They’ve been printing on Saturdays for a good long time so it’s really just a redesign of the paper and the same old content about evil Liberal/Labor politicians, enlightened calzone-serving Greens MPs and restaurants that serve polenta. Hopefully, they’ll at least get the spelling right, although as we’ll see, early signs are not encouraging.

A member of the VEXNEWS Investigations Unit embedded secretly within the Fairfax distribution network advises that he today feared for the safety of some animals after a large number of sealed boxes from The Age newspaper were labelled to the effect that they contained “badgers”.

He was already half-way through calling the loud Hugh Wirth of the RSPCA to alert them to this wrongdoing when he opened the package and discovered merely “badges” presumably made in China to promote the re-launch or re-design or re-cycle of the Saturday Age, which once used to make so much money that even a descendant of Lang Hancock would be well impressed.

It has fallen on leaner times due to merciful collapse in classifieds advertising, cannibalised by cheap if not completely free alternatives online, so Fairfax management are trying to fire up their dwindling number of customers about the edition that usually gets the best features and scoops, such as they are. With the departure of Andrew Rule – exclusively reported first on VEXNEWS – and some speculating about the possible departure of his bald sidekick John “Sly” Silvester things are bleaker at Media House than a muggy, grey Melbourne Friday afternoon.

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