Tomorrow’s news today!

March 27, 2009

“Smart and responsible activism” – YouTube

Inspired by a long continuum, from the Evading Standards of Reclaim the Streets to The Yes Men’s New York Times special edition [which also spawned this, this, this and this], I decided last December to publish a spoof Financial Times.

It took three months, mostly spent laying out the print edition, and designing a website. Not enough time was devoted to fund-raising, or recruiting volunteers, but a hundred or so kindly turned out.

An anonymous couple of activists, one a web designer, lent valuable support with preparations, and The Curmudgeonly Philip Challinor supplied the funny bits.

All the stories in the paper can be read here, and a copy downloaded here. Or you can hear all about it in this video:

Not the FT, by Raoul Djukanovic (a 2020 action film).

The full Greenvoice interview is here:

Another extended interview, with Christian Aid’s Ctrl.Alt.Shift magazine, is available here:

There’s also more on related themes in this article by Orlando Hughes in JO Magazine.

MEDIA REACTION

It was interesting to see how widely our press release was reprinted, given the thrust of the paper’s analysis, which was later reprinted in the British Journalism Review.

27 MARCH 2009

Fake FT wakes up London to radical action

Concerned Londoners today handed out copies of a spoof Financial Times, urging journalists and big business to make the future possible by putting people first.

Set in 2020, the 12-page paper revealed how action in 2009 reined in climate change, saving billions from extinction. Carbon rationing didn’t kill us, it explained, despite the inconvenience to multinational companies. But we couldn’t have endless growth with finite resources. Editors even apologised for suggesting otherwise.

“We live on financial crimes,” the paper confessed in a front-page advert, which satirised a recent Financial Times billboard. “In a world of cold harsh truths,” it said, beside a panting St Bernard atop a mountain, “we rescue stories from the facts.”

Launched at dawn from behind Waterloo station, this coup was aimed at everyone’s excuses for apathy. Unless we change the way we live radically, we’ll make our world uninhabitable within decades. It’s time for drastic action, and if governments won’t take it, we have to do something ourselves.

“Journalists frame public debate, and the City frames public policy,” said Raoul Djukanovic, who edited today’s fake FT. “If they reframed their thinking, they could help build a different world instead of conning us with lifestyle porn and bubbles.”

The paper was a full-colour replica of the iconic pink ‘un, including news from Britain and abroad, and editorials and comment, poking fun at FT columnists. It was funded by donations on the Internet, and given away for free by volunteers. Tens of thousands of copies were printed – almost as many as the FT sells here daily.

Why bother, some commuters asked. “Newspapers won’t change the world, but they do spread words that can make people think,” said Marcos Marcuse, who handed out papers near London Bridge. “What are we going to tell our children? That we thought about trying to save ourselves, but it wasn’t ‘good business’ or ‘objective reporting’?”