A Funnier-Than-Usual Journal Gets Snapped Up Early
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: April 14, 2008
It seems someone at The Wall Street Journal really likes a biting new parody of the paper — likes it enough, in fact, to leave at least one newsstand with no copies remaining for anyone else to buy.
The tabloid-format satire, “My Wall Street Journal,” mostly sets out to skewer The Journal’s new owner, the News Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, with swipes at News properties like Fox News, The New York Post and The Journal itself. It takes aim at other targets, too, including Wall Street firms and traders, and assorted politicians and pundits.
It was not supposed to go on sale until this week, but some newsstands began selling it early. Last Thursday, Alexander Laurence was working at one such stand in Los Angeles, chatting with a customer, David Metz, when, both of them say, a man in a shirt with a Journal logo asked if anyone had seen a paper that looked sort of like The Journal.
“This guy comes by all the time to bring promotional stuff for The Wall Street Journal — bags, coin trays, stickers,” Mr. Laurence said.
Sure enough, they found what he was looking for. “He grabbed them all, said, ‘I need to buy all of these,’ ” Mr. Laurence said. “He had been going around to different stands, buying them.”
The man paid with a corporate American Express card. “At first he’s saying they have to make a correction or it’s not supposed to be out yet,” Mr. Metz said. “But then he said these are not published by The Wall Street Journal.”
A spokesman for The Journal, Robert H. Christie, declined to comment.
Tony Hendra, editor in chief of the satire, has experience as a creator of Journal parodies in 1982 and 1983. This time, he had contributions from a team of comedy writers, including Andy Borowitz, Richard Belzer and Terry Jones. The result will be on sale this week at newsstands and bookstores, at Amazon.com, and at wsjparody.com. Mr. Hendra, a former editor of National Lampoon, said he had not heard of anyone trying to hoard copies. “But it certainly would be good for sales,” he said. “I’d find it amusing if they bought all 250,000. We could print more.” RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
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