Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:Jimbo Wales is, in my opinion, an elitist asshat
UnNews:Jimbo Wales is, in my opinion, an elitist asshat[edit source]
A parody (important emphasis) of opinion columns. My main concern is it's humor value. -- Kip the Egg 
Talk Works 05:45, Mar. 26, 2010
| Humour: | 8 | I lolled a few times. There are some very good humorous elements in here, although of course the brunt of it all is that it comes down to the reader picking up the concept in time to get into the humour.
Therefore I'd suggest throwing into the second paragraph the credentials of the writer, something along the lines of ...diarrhoea of the mouth. I was also there to witness it, as a highly respected senior editor of daily periodical. Among the things... This establishes the voice a little clearer as being that of an elitest asshat, and means that the reader doesn't sit there scratching their head and wondering why this should be funny. It is a subtler humour than many of the articles on here, and it does need to be done carefully to make it a rant but at the same time have the feel of an opinion column. You've managed to get the balance right, from my perspective, but I would like to see some more self-aggrandisement in with this as well. Keeping in mind that the narrator is writing from his own ego, he should be putting more emphasis on how good he is at the same time as saying how wrong Jimbo is. Maybe throwing something in there about how there are senior editors of papers who have won a such-and-such prize, and the prize has high regard as it is from a poll not from the unwashed masses but from a panel of highly respected print journalists at the peak of the industry, including many senior editors. |
| Concept: | 8 | A good parody on a easily recognisable type of writing. One of the difficulties with scoring concept on a piece like this is that it is based upon real news, so much of the concept is borrowed from the source itself.
What you have done well is taking the news and looking at it from a biased perspective, and then writing it from that angle. The concept could potentially be expanded upon to cover the fact that print media does find itself being slowly edged out of the market by it's online competitors. A couple of other sources that you may be interested in incorporating are this story and this story. The fact that print is having to find other ways to increase the profit from it's readership shows that it is a dying medium. I don't know what the stats are worldwide, but I know that 90% of jobs in Australia are now advertised online, as are 92% of houses in Australia, and that Australia are apparently two years behind America in this type of social change. These used to be two of the biggest sales points for weekend newspapers. The paranoia that this is causing in the print media industry would be being felt personally from your narrator, and I'd suggest that some of that would leak into this editorial. Oh, and I concede that Jimmy Wales is probably correct with his assertion: Not many want to pay money for others to write their opinions. is completely out of character. It should be something along the lines of If Jimmy Wales was correct, why would so many people pay to read editorial content. People won't know what opinions they should hold unless someone points it out to them. would be more what I would expect. |
| Prose and formatting: | 6 | A few grammatical and spelling issues popped up along the way that let the tone of this piece down, so I'd strongly suggest have someone PROOF this as well. Heartstings should probably have a second r in it, and Perhaps I'm a little old fashion? should be fashioned.
Format-wise I have no issues - it's a standard layout for an UnNews piece. Maybe it could be tweaked to look more newspaperish? First word in any article should be capitalised. Some it looks something like -
The more that this looks like a newspaper article the more that people can tune in to who they are listening to. Here's one I prepared earlier that was designed to look more like newsprint and less like online material, while still fitting into an online format. |
| Images: | 7 | I have nothing to add in the images area that could really help, but this is not an article that needs to be overladen by images. Maybe if the images were in monochrome rather than colour it would again suit the feel of the piece a little better, but it's not an easy call to make.
The first image does give that air of superiority that you need for this piece, and the second one does have an aged feeling to it. Possibly the one addition that I would make would be if you were to go a step further in establishing the credentials of the writer first of all. Often tabloid have a brief 3 line blurb about the writer of a piece with an image of them. The author here has to be a middle aged man, and the three line blurb that accompanies his image is "Glenn Fitzgerald is the senior editor of Daily News, currently on loan to us here at UnNews." (Before anyone argues, we technically don't have bylines in UnNews, but in this case it's not for Kip to be mentioned, but the fictional author.) |
| Miscellaneous: | 7 | All in all a good article, and very well done. It needs a little tightening up, but anything that I've mentioned is minor window dressing on an otherwise brilliant piece. Congrats! |
| Final Score: | 36 | Overall score - not that the score is important really. |
| Reviewer: | Nominally Humane! some time Monday, 00:18, Apr 5 2010 UTC | |
