What's Really Funny About Tribune's April Fools' Prank

The bankrupt brains at Tribune Co. sure had a laugh Wednesday. After filing for bankruptcy, shrinking their papers' Washington bureaus and firing hundreds of employees across the country, Tribune thought it could make it all better with a joke.

So on April Fools' Day, they issued a press release -- accompanied by a mysteriously well-designed homepage -- that boasted the creation of something called the "Accelerator," some kind of super-communications thingy that threatens to make the Internet obsolete in a year. It uses nanotechnology, it displays holographs, it has voice recognition in every language, and it has a plutonium battery. All this (and so much more) is detailed on Tribune's release and website, which looks like it took hours, and maybe days, to perfect.

When crafting this prank, Tribune's idea men -- Sam Zell, Lee Abrams and Randy Michaels -- must have put a lot of effort into it, maybe even working overtime. Michaels, the chief operating officer, says in the fake news release that the Accelerator team "put in long hours, many of them sober. And this marvelous device is the result -- The Accelerator(TM) will mean billions in revenue, and the end of the extremely competitive advertising environment in which we've been operating."

Nobody laughed very hard upon reading this. And given Abrams's propensity for writing "think pieces" full of misspellings, ALL-CAPS DECLARATIONS and stream-of-consciousness ideas from a dream-like state, it's no surprise that the Tribune team made its highest priority for April 1 wiping out its Tribune.com website to promote a product that isn't real. (Abrams's style is not representative of the papers his company owns; in addition to not proofreading, he also doesn't check facts, which is evident in this January blast about a quote from Mariah Carey that she never said.)

So who was the joke intended for? Investors who wanted to see how the flailing company is performing after the first three months of 2009? Editors of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times who wanted to see if their newsrooms would be losing more money this month?

Perhaps the group laughing the least is the growing number of laid off journalists who have felt the slice of the mighty Tribune sword. Former reporters of the Tribune's Hartford Courant, which fired 100 employees in February, have formed an "Alumni Association and Refugee Camp." One of them, noting that the folks in the Tribune Co. tower have more time on their hands than those at the struggling papers who are picking up more work for less wages, visited the Hartford newsroom and saw that the journalists "are in no mood for jokes -- at least corporately produced jokes."

(I know for a fact that Courant reporters love good fun; when I was an intern there last summer, the staffers dug out the eyes of CEO Zell's face on a cake before devouring it, in between two waves of buyouts.)

For what it's worth, though, the press release for Tribune's phony gadget has a glimmer of truth in it -- but not for the Accelerator. Rather, for Tribune.

Take, for example, this quote from Tribune Interactive President Marc Chase (real person): "There are still a few bugs to be worked out." Like the billions of dollars in debt that Zell heaved onto the company when he overtook it in December 2007?

Chase also says, "We're confident that we're in the end-stage development phase." That may be a bit foreboding for a company operating under Chapter 11 and not showing any signs of ever seeing numbers in the black again.

Michaels, though, was more direct in his triumph. "The game is over," he said. "We win."

Hilarious.