Bono’s Blog

Dear Rupert:

Bitchin’ beach party. You were right, next to alligator wrestling, body surfing is the ultimate extreme sport. Now that things are looking up for you buying the Wall Street Journal, I’d like to nominate myself as the new editor. I’ve got plenty of experience and big plans.

1. Make it glossy. If the brass won’t let me turn the WSJ into a pretty magazine, then each paper will come with special edition U2 autographed reading gloves to prevent ink smudges.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve never actually read a newspaper in print before. My sunglasses have a computer installed so I can read the BBC online while shaking hands with AIDS victims or when we have to play songs off Pop during concerts. (I still can’t believe I listened to Edge when he said “All the cool bands are going ambient.”)

2. Reporting should be more temporal. People shouldn’t be told what to think. They need to connect with the spirit of the article to draw their own conclusions. For instance, this story about China enslaving its citizens gets bogged down with suffocating information.

“In early March, Li Yaokai, a skinny 18-year-old from this small mountainside village in central China, embarked on his first trip to the provincial capital. It didn’t take long for him to get dragged into a huge forced-labor scandal whose gruesome details are now coming to light.”

Sorry Mr. Fairclough, you lost me at Li. With some “light” editing, this passage can be pared down to the following stanza journalism sentence cluster:

Trapped in a land of yellow
Torture is freedom from choice
How long must we sing this song*

3. News will now cost $200. Exactly twice as much as a computer and half as much as an obstructed-view ticket at one of my shows. But seriously this news piracy must end. In addition to the standard distribution department, I will create an offsetting branch of equal or greater force known simply as “confiscation”. Confiscators will follow readers and scoop up the papers once the original buyer has finished reading. Delivery boys will be tailed by a collection crew.

Hope you are up to the task delivery team, my accumulation squad will look like this! (Not the bloody guy on the right.) Finally, all discussion of current events between non-subscribers in real time must be limited to a three sentence brief.

That should do it. Oh and just in case it might become a problem later, I will need approximately 250 sick days for touring, etc. I think I might be coming down with something … something known as rock’n'roll fever.

As they say in your country … Good on ya,

Bono

*If I’ve used this line before, replace with “I want to be with you night and day” or “imperialism really fucked Africa … Asia?”