JUST ARRIVED IN DORSEYLAND!

I am so very, very sorry to Matt Drudge, the blogger who somehow became a kingmaker in American presidential politics, for unabashedly stealing his webpage’s design, I truly am. The Dorse Report is just a bit of fun, really, a mock-up of the bizarrely mega-popular Drudge Report, in this case pulling together links to recent posts here and at Dali House.

Unlike the originator, though, I really don’t think I can update my report daily or even regularly, so for now, it’s just out there.

I’ve worked at eight newspapers in 33 years*, though two of them suggest that the total is actually 10. The Hong Kong Standard was revamped and rebranded as the Hong Kong iMail while I was there, and currently The Nation in Bangkok is burping a squawking baby named Daily Xpress (not THE Daily Xpress, just Daily Xpress).

Kids have funny names these days, don’t they? But what’s funnier — at times, less so at others — is the state in which newspaper owners come back from media conferences where they’ve been breathing the hyper-charged oxygen piped in from cyberspace.

Nation founder and group editor-in-chief Suthichai Yoon, who’s old enough to know better, and Nation president Pana Janviroj, who’s not, are high as Himalayan yaks at the moment. They think the Internet is God and insist that their employees join them in worshipping at the altar of the World Wide Web.

I have plenty of reverence for the Net, but in terms of faith I’m very much an agnostic. I expect the Web will still be 90% trivia the day I die and long afterward too. But now the printed news media, convinced by advertisers that the only market is youth, are frantically replicating its format and giving more weight to page views than facts checked, more heft to hit counts than a decent story well told.

Two millennia ago, the original Americans in what is now southern Utah used to catch up on the news at the place pictured above (with the alien mascot of Daily Xpress peeking over its summit).

People from different clans — the Anasazi, Basketmaker, Fremont, Pueblo, Navajo, Fremont, Ute, Anglo … a real gathering of the tribes — would stop off at the big red sandstone cliff that the Navajo eventually called Tse’ Hane, which means “rock that tells a story”, and they’d tell a story in art. Today we call this art petroglyphs and the place Newspaper Rock. There’s more!

I’ve heard from the president of Poseidon Undersea Resorts Inc, L Bruce Jones, about a a typically flippant Dorseyland post a year ago on his company’s planned submarine hotel off Fiji, where I would love to blow my retirement bubbles.

While forwarding another great artist’s conception of the underwater inn, Bruce left a comment in response to an earlier comment by someone who turns out to be a former employee. Office politics!

“Tales of our demise are greatly exaggerated,” Bruce says. “We had a delay because of the coup in Fiji and are on-track and going strong.” Well, we know about coups here in Thailand, so we can sympathise.

“Here’s your home under the sea,” Bruce emailed me separately with the hi-res picture, while admitting that “staying at Poseidon would get a bit spendy”.

I shook the email to see if a voucher on a week’s stay at the hotel might fall out, but no luck. Meanwhile, for drooling purposes, we can continue ogling the plans at PoseideonResorts.com, a really nicely designed site.

There I was, minding my own business on a clouded yet certainly unstormy day, when a cat joined me, ostensibly for companionship or possibly the possibility of cadging a snack. I had no food, and presumably because of that, just as the photo was about to be snapped, came an electrical retribution with the warning (as I interpret it), “The next time there’d better be food!”

Poor people never seem to think twice about having more babies (God sends them extra money when they do), and sure enough, my newspaper, The Nation — slammed against the debtor’s wall and bleeding red ink — spawned another mouth to feed last week and called it Free.

Actually the shudder-worthy name is Daily Xpress, and it was delivered by an alien. I was among those nominated to be wet nurses and, after only four days, I’m already feeling sucked dry.

The Xpress hit the streets on March 5 with many a punter placing bets on the date it’s going to hit the skids. No one is terribly optimistic, though you certainly wouldn’t know it from the cheery public promotions. As for me, I’ve been in the thick of this sort of thing once before, when the Hong Kong Standard suddenly became the Hong Kong iMail — with near-fatal results.

“Thailand’s first free English-language newspaper”, they claim of the Xpress.

That doesn’t sound right to me, but I’m too busy to quibble over that or the well-imbursed designers’ assurances that surveys taken here, there and everywhere definitively prove that this is what the modern newspaper reader wants:

* It’s small, but we’re avoiding the word “tabloid” because Britain’s News of the World and Sun own that sordid turf — ours is a “compact” paper. My contribution to a staff farewell to readers of The Nation’s now-defunct “Life” features section was, “Welcome to the future, please mind your head”, since the future is, you know, smaller.

* The presentation has to be all big, big pictures and many, many, many tiny but attention-grabbing bits and bytes of information, with “balconies” across the top of every page containing factoids like the percentage of rotten teeth in the average 10-year-old Thai kid’s head.

* It’s free, and the idea is that 100,000 copies are going to be handed out every day of the week and people will snag one, have a 20-minute breeze through while they’re riding the subway to work, and then either stuff it in their briefcase so they can consult the movie listings or do the sudoku later, or else leave it lying around for the next customer, of which there’s one born every minute.

* The target group is 25 to 35 years old — the generation born without an attention span — so no stories over 300 words. No one has actually come right out and told us to dumb down the content, but really, the content in most newspapers is already pretty dumb. All we’re doing now is saying stuff faster, before the kids wander off again to resume the Ragnarok game on their mobiles.

As of Friday night, mother and child were doing reasonably well. The Nation has a fresh look too, befitting “Thailand’s largest business daily”, as the new pitch goes. It’s dumped almost all of its featurish stuff on the Xpress to concentrate on business and finance with a smattering of politics.

To celebrate the birth of Xpress, advertisers bought up almost all of the pages, so there was even less editorial content than we’d planned, and then a couple of thousand of them went to our swank, multi-million-baht party called “W’Hot on earth is going on?” in the Centara cavern at Central World. It featured limbo dancing, fortune-telling and “some of the hottest musicians and bands”, although the main draw seemed to be the teenage sugar water from television’s frighteningly popular reality-talent-contest “Academy Fantasia”.

Daily Xpress photos in this post — thanks, fellas!

The bizarre name for the party derived from the chief theme of the promotional campaign, in which an alien kept turning up in silly print ads and a rather funny one on TV. I couldn’t decide which was weirder: suggesting than only freaks from space read Xpress or showing one of them going gaga when he sees pictures of sexy girls in it. (I use the word “sexy” in the ostensible sense, because the cover girl for our debut issue — a singer named Lydia who’s close to the former prime minister we can’t seem to get rid of — isn’t sexy. Actually she looks like an alien.) There’s more!