The Mammalian Daily

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OTD in 2012—CLucK Radio to reduce air time


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CLucK Radio announced today that it plans to reduce its on-air time by four hours per day, beginning 1 June.

J.J. Chanticleer, CLucK Radio’s manager, called the decision “strictly financial” and said it was due to projected losses in advertising revenue.

“We’re primarily a morning station,” Chanticleer said. “We have a very loyal audience in the early hours of the day and, consequently, loyal advertisers. But, we have been finding it increasingly difficult to support our late-afternoon and early evening programming,” he said.

OTD in 2012—Rufus di Rafineschi appointed Toe-Hair Contest’s head judge

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The Park’s Department of Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations announced early this morning that Rufus di Rafineschi has been appointed head judge of today’s Toe-Hair Contest.

The event, which is in its 17th year, is set to commence at 10:00 a.m. Park time at the Ancient, Open-Air Theatre.

Di Rafineschi, who won the 2004 Toe-Hair Contest, will head a group of five judges in total. According to the Contest rules, di Rafineschi will vote along with his peers, but his vote also has the potential to end a tie among the other four judges.

“The position is an important one,” said a spokesAnimal for the Department. “Should there be a tie, the head judge, who is an Animal with greater expertise than the other judges, has the ability to choose the winner. It is a position of responsibility that calls for a great deal of knowledge and personal integrity,” she said.

The other four Contest judges are Oskar Sloth, Gabriel B. Bear, Kyle P. Caribou, and Duggan C. Raven.

OTD in 2013—Picnic organizer to do double-duty as contest’s head judge

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2012 Toe-Hair contest winner Seymour K. Worthington Polar Bear will serve as head judge of this year's contest, a little more than a month after organizing the Polar Bear's Poetry PicnicA little more than a month after organizing the Polar Bears’ Poetry Picnic, Seymour K. Worthington Polar Bear has agreed to serve as head judge of the 2013 Toe-Hair Contest.

After The Park’s Department of Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations made the announcement this morning, the winner of the 2012 Toe-Hair Contest spent a few minutes fielding the media’s questions before heading to his office.

Standing in front of the Ancient, Open-Air Theatre, the site of tomorrow’s event, Worthington asserted that he was feeling “invigorated rather than spent” after the Poetry Picnic, and pooh-poohed the idea, expressed by some media representatives, that he was “spreading himself too thin.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “I’m in fighting shape…[I’m] a good weight and I have a keen eye, and not just for poetry,” he joked.

He added that the Poetry Picnic had allowed him to hone his “Animal” skills and learn to work well with others.

“That is an important requirement of any organizer, but also of a head judge among [other] judges,” he said.

According to the Contest rules, the head judge votes along with his peers, but his vote also has the potential to end a tie among the other four judges.

“The position is an important one,” said Aintza Kanariar, Director of Public Relations for the department, at the time of the announcement.

“Should there be a tie, the head judge, who is an Animal with greater expertise than the other judges, has the ability to choose the winner. It is a position of responsibility that calls for a great deal of knowledge and personal integrity,” she said.

The other four contest judges are Marsha Shrew, Barton L. Bradypus, JerMain Jerboa, and Gabrielle T. Gecko, whose grandfather, Samuel P. Gecko, was awarded second prize in the 2004 contest.

The event, which is in its 18th year, is set to commence at 10:00 a.m. Park time.

OTD in 2014—Park novelist’s unused titles to be auctioned off for charity

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Renowned Park writerIt’s a veritable title wave!

Renowned Park novelist Hentrick Olifant announced that he is retiring from fiction writing and has decided to auction off all his unused titles.

In a short statement released today, Olifant thanked his readers for their many years of loyalty and said his plans for the future do not include novel writing.

“My days of writing fiction are over. With the years left to me, I would like to pursue other endeavours, including rest, but before I do so, I wish to thank my many readers for their loyalty. As you well know, my life in The Park predates zoocracy and should I decide at some point to resume writing, it would most likely be in the form of history or personal memoir,” the statement said.

Olifant is known as one of The Park’s most prolific writers and experts estimate that the number of titles put up for auction could be in the thousands.

“He is a great thinker as well as a great writer and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes up in the auction,” says Park historian Pieter Paaard.

Best known for his novel, Grasses, Leaves, Bamboo, Bark, which won the 2006  award for fiction at the Park Annual Literary Awards (now Chitter Radio Literary Awards), Olifant also served as a Park Archon in 27 AZ (2009).

According to his representatives, Olifant intends to donate all proceeds from the title auction to Park charities.

OTD in 2015—Follow Month Without Metaphor participants on Twitter during May

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MWM

Click on the image above to follow Month Without Metaphor (MWM) on Twitter!

Members of The Park’s media who have committed to participating in Month Without Metaphor will again be tweeting throughout the month of May, it has been confirmed.

In a joint statement issued today, the participants, who work for The Park’s newspapers, magazines, journals, radio and television stations and web sites said they “look forward to surpassing last year’s experiment in expressing themselves and discussing the events of the day in a more straightforward way.”

Today’s statement also confirmed that editors would be keeping a running tally, “so that we’ll be able to see which members of the media were best able to communicate without using metaphors.”

The purpose of Month Without Metaphor is to gauge the effectiveness of reporting the news “like it really is…no embellishments, no idiotic comparisons, no ridiculous painting of pictures for the reading public,” says Alvin Tinamou, publisher of The Avian Messenger and one of the organizers of the communications experiment.

“We think all this metaphorical reporting is obscuring the facts and distracting our readers’ attention from the important issues,” he says.

Follow MWM participants on Twitter during May.

OTD in 2015—Stereotype Sundays go bold: “Hello, my name is Filthy Pig, Stupid Sheep…”

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Stereotype SundaysAre you a Dirty Rat?

While you may not view yourself that way, apparently that is how many others see you.

That much was made clear yesterday, when The Park’s Stereotype Sundays took a bold turn and encouraged Animals to participate in what many were calling a “grand experiment.”

“We handed out name tags and told the attendees…go bold…write down the vilest thing that you have ever heard about yourself or your species. Don’t think about it too much. Just write it down and wear it around and see what happens,” said one of the event’s organizers.

The experiment, or “initiative,” as organizers prefer to call it, was the idea of Dewi Rhinoceros, whose tenure as Chief Archon in 2013 included establishing the weekly event in order to foster interspecial harmony.

Rhinoceros, now Chair of the Board of Directors of the Centre for Interspecial Harmony (CIH), says she was moved to intervene in the weekly project when she realized it had stalled and was no longer serving its purpose.

“We established Stereotype Sundays to foster interspecial harmony through honest discussion. It worked very well for the first year and a half. And, then, the honest approach seemed to lose its meaning and almost disappear. All of a sudden, we were just nodding our heads…as Hieronynous [Hedgehog] says, in active self-agreement. We were admitting our problems, but not moving forward. It was as if we’d accepted prejudice, intolerance, misinformation and stereotyping as necessary elements of life.”

The new approach won’t be a weekly component of the event, though, organizers say.

“We asked those who participated to come back next week and discuss the results. If it appears that it was successful, we’ll continue it, perhaps, on a monthly basis. In any case, it was well worth the effort. Everybody is talking about it today.”

OTD in 2012—Park’s first openly aged Archon slams news media bias

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Archon Thurmond Tortoise will celebrate his 130th birthday this year

The Park’s first openly aged Archon has slammed Park media for what he calls “overt bias in their portrayal of the elderly.”

Thurmond L. Tortoise, who will celebrate his 130th birthday this year, is the oldest Animal in the history of zoocracy to serve as Archon. As such, he says, he feels a duty to speak out against the media’s depiction of The Park’s elderly.

“If you were to believe [The Park’s] press, you’d think we [the aging] were all enfeebled,  waiting to die, or…waiting to be told what is best for us by the young, the naive, and the foolish,” he said.

The Tortoise’s remarks were made at the annual Association of Media Outlets of The Park (AMOP) dinner, which was held last night.

Asked his opinion of the job that Park media are doing, the Tortoise did not hold back.

“These misconceptions about the elderly run rampant across the media landscape,”  he said. “We are being disrespected by a group of ignorant young Animals who have control over the media.We are the founders of this zoocracy; we fought for the freedom and independence that they [youth] are experiencing. We deserve to be treated properly,” he said.

OTD in 2014—Catch a metaphor, win a prize: Mammalian Daily contest begins May 1

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MonthWithoutMetaphor

Click the image for a definition of “metaphor”

The Mammalian Daily is putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak.

So committed is this newspaper to the idea of Park media’s Month Without Metaphor, that our managing editor, Orphea Haas, is offering a reward to those able to catch any slip-ups that our writers make during the month of May.

“We respect our readers and we know they will be watching every move we make,” said Haas in an interview on Mammalian Daily Radio this morning.

“If they’re willing to spend their time scoping out our prose, we will be happy to reward them for finding any mistakes that we’ve made.”

Haas denied, however, that the paper intends to slip in the odd metaphor just to keep readers on their toes…and rewarded.

“It will be hard enough for us to accomplish a month of writing without using any metaphors,” she said. “I don’t think we have to worry about cheating our readers.”

OTD in 2012—Eggie and The Pigs turn music’s business model upside-down

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Eggie and The Pigs are poised to change the way the music business is done here in The Park.

According to a spokesAnimal for the group, the four musicians have decided to allow their listening public to determine the shape and content of their next song collection.

The group’s manager released the following statement this morning:

Instead of recording songs (either individually or as a collection), ETP will be making each of their new songs available as a free digital download for listeners to enjoy.

Each song will be available for one month, during which time listeners are invited to register and vote on whether or not they wish to have the song included in ETP’s next collection.

At the end of the year, after the votes have been tallied, ETP will post another online poll that will ask listeners the order in which they would like the chosen songs to appear on the new recording, the group’s manager said.

ETP’s fans appear to be ecstatic about this new arrangement. Posting on Gewper a few minutes after the statement was released, many fans called this a “musical revolution” and some hailed the decision as granting “power to the listener.”

“I’m all ears, bring it on,” one fan wrote, succinctly, and many agreed.

Music business executives, however, have been less enthusiastic. A spokesAnimal for Rotunda Records warned of the dangers of changing the decision-making dynamic so drastically.

“Once you go down that road, there’s no turning back,” he said in an interview on Toro Talk Radio. “I think they’re forgetting about the expertise that music business experts have. Fans are important; we can’t do without them, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to produce a good musical recording,” he said.

OTD in 2012—New device may help distinguish news from entertainment

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Is it news or is it entertainment?

That is the question that many Park Animals are asking, as the boundary between the two, in both broadcast and print media, becomes increasingly blurred.

Enter KartalTechSolutions, S.A. and their revolutionary new device, the Verifyzer™, which company executives claim solves this “modern dilemma” almost instantly.

“This new instrument will tell you, within five seconds, whether what you’re reading or watching is news or entertainment,” said President and CEO, Fikret Kartal, at the product’s launch this past weekend.

On hand at the outdoor launch, which doubled as a pop-up Verifyzer™ retail store, were many representatives of The Park’s media community, as well as some faculty members of the Cuthbert School of Journalism at the University of West Terrier. Many were eager to voice their skepticism of KartalTech’s claims about the new device.

“The company bases the success of this device on a number of assumptions, the most important of which is that there is an objective — and detectable — difference between so-called news and entertainment,” said Journalism Professor and author, Ludwiga Saimiri. “This is something that journalists strive to define every day of their working lives, but it is not something about which, as yet, anyone can make a definitive pronouncement.”

Noburu Akita, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Newspaper Activity in The Park (C-SNAP) was even more adamant:

“There is no such thing as anything [being] objective in the newspaper business,” he said. “These definitions are fluid, they change with the seasons…with the generations; unfortunately, one Animal’s news is, sometimes, another Animal’s entertainment. And vice-versa.”

Also present at the launch was Rodolfo van de Gier, President of the Association of Media Outlets of The Park (AMOP). Among other things, he took issue with the company’s guarantee of an accuracy rate of 92 per cent.

“The only thing any device can do, as far as I know,” said van de Gier, “is detect the presence of, for instance, celebrities’ names in a print or voice report. But that isn’t necessarily an indication of the nature of the report. Whether you want to admit it or not, celebrities can be involved in ‘real’ news and, sometimes, ‘real’ news can be enormously entertaining,” he said.

In response to van de Gier’s remarks, a KartalTech spokesAnimal, issued this statement:

“With due respect to the AMOP President’s remarks, technology has come a long way from merely detecting names. I invite Mr. van de Gier to attend a full demonstration of our device and to see, for himself, what our new age has to offer.”

While van de Gier has, thus far, made no reply, the Verifyzer™  is scheduled to hit Park stores at the beginning of May.

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