Dear Team,
I’m emailing this letter to the staff and posting it on my website to announce that I’m quitting The Daily Planet today. Unfortunately, I am unable to finish the articles assigned to me this week about “Instagram Hacks for Becoming More Self-Involved,” “Why Having A Yacht Will Make Anybody Nice,” and “Ten Outfits To Make You Look Sexy While Blowing Up The Universe.” This new reporting style doesn’t fit me.
I’m going to miss The Daily Planet. Before Lex Luthor’s hedge fund bought us out and we started reporting only by telephone, I loved running to crime scenes. I appreciated how understanding you were when I disappeared for my long breaks. I’ll never forget the time I helped Lois write the article that exposed the Brainiac for making Superman tweet pictures of himself twerking during a tense summit meeting with the president.
And wow, what a ride it’s been since Lex started giving us the opportunity to write numerous articles, every day! I’ve tried to get with the program. I stuck post-its on my desk that say “tell the truth,” “save the little guy,” and “do it for America.” I’ve been reading All The President’s Men every night. Despite such efforts, I couldn’t write today about how neon spandex man bikinis (properly arranged) can distract most people from noticing mayhem.
Lois told me about what happened when she turned in her eighth article for the day with “hgfffffft” in the last paragraph. She said she was trying to finish while Mister Mxyzptlk attacked her with a meat cleaver.
Since you fired her for that, she’s been blogging from home on the weekends. Her first article revealed that Solomon Grundy has been publishing some dangerous Instagram photos: they turn teenagers into zombie-like creatures that can do nothing but take incessant selfies.
Not many people have seen Lois’ expose yet, since the search engines always rank the Legion of Doom’s website higher than hers. I’m going to join her effort and learn how to market her work. We’re excited that we can still cover the news that saves the world, while also sifting through millions of technical manuals online to find the one or two that explain how to post long-form articles on Twitter in only a few hundred simple steps.
Meanwhile, I’m happy to help you all with this transition. I can share the excel sheet that I made for my in-depth investigation into the nice things that yacht owners have done in recent years; it lists the number of times Lex stroked his hairless cat. Some of the other items might need more analysis. For example, Lex provided free training to publishers, which is nice, except that it consisted of three people who visited only a handful of newsrooms each year. Mostly, the “trainers” explained how to solve the publishing industry’s financial problems by paying for Lex’s services, such as his unique analytical tool for collecting data about pictures of Tiktok dancers.
The girl Lex hired to replace Lois seems to have mastered the googling part of reporting. My recommendation would be that you give her enough time to follow up on her first front-page story, “Superman Moons Metropolis From the Sky.” She might try asking Superman for a comment on what he was doing. She should fact-check this, but rumor has it that Superman stripped while he was flying in a bid to garner more attention on Twitter. He was already halfway naked anyway when he started wearing red spandex underwear. Everybody has googled “Superman and butt” at least once, so maybe mooning people will improve his search engine rankings.
Stay in touch. You can find me on Twitter, where I will do my best to ensure that journalism remains a noble cause!
Sincerely,
Clark Kent