The Serangga Star Adviser (formerly The Insect Intelligencer) hit the newsstands yesterday. The rebranded daily will focus on political and social issues and use its “Fly on the Wall” feature to highlight injustice in The Park.
Five months after shutting down and cleaning house, The Insect Intelligencer hit the newsstands again yesterday, but as a very different daily.
Rebranding itself as “The Park’s Most Authoritative Newspaper,” the Intelligencer has a new name, a new Editor-in-Chief and a completely new focus.
“We are going to do our best to make you forget all about the Intelligencer,” said Editor-in-Chief Priscilla Weevil at a press conference this afternoon.
Weevil, who took over after management ousted Fannia di Volo, has worked hard on the rebranding effort and insiders say she influenced everything from the hiring of new reporters to the journal’s new name.
And that name, contends Weevil, says it all.
The Serangga Star Adviser is the paper’s name, as of November 1. And, since it isn’t immediately obvious that it is an Insect newspaper, Weevil is more than prepared to deal with the inevitable questions about the decision.
“The word ‘Serangga’ means ‘Insect’ but not every Animal knows that,” says Weevil.
“We thought it was important to select a name that was Insect-inclusive, but we also wanted to illustrate our commitment to every species in The Park. We want to be the newspaper that all Animals go to for reliable information; we want every species to be able to count on our reporters for the facts and, even more than reporting the news, we want to uncover injustice in The Park and to highlight wrongs that need to be righted,” she says.
The paper’s new mission is a far cry from that of the Intelligencer, whose run came to an abrupt end last June after it printed a front page story announcing that Humans had become an extinct species.
“We try not to look back, but to look forward,” Weevil says. And of all the ambitious plans she listed for the paper she now runs, perhaps the most forward-looking is her re-make of the Intelligencer’s infamous Fly on the Wall feature.
That feature, which began as a mixture of out-of-Park news, gossip, and speculation rapidly spiralled downward as it attempted to feed its readership’s ever-increasing appetite for blood and dirt. Weevil says she intends to use it now, though, “to highlight injustice in The Park and to bring about change, even if it means having to shame those who are causing the injustice.”
To some readers, the changes in the paper may not seem so drastic, after all.
A heart-shaped terracotta dish bearing the good wishes of thousands of Animals and hung on the eastern wall helped make yesterday’s send-off even more meaningful for The Park’s hibernating community.
