Pulp friction

WHAT is it about certain magazines and newspapers with combined circulations in millions? And why do our bosses get so excited when they see us with one?

If you've ever read an in-house journal, you'll know the answer.

It's not as if we're not bombarded with quite enough pieces of paper already at work. But the corporate machine grinds on - and the MD needs some way of explaining why his new personal stand-up self- tanning solarium in leopard-skin finish is in the company interest.

It's well known fact that a roomful of monkeys with a typewriter would take several thousand years to produce a page of Shakespeare. Well, they could probably rustle up a house journal in about five minutes. Because titles apart - and who can resist Sunnyside, once the house magazine of the American Crematorium Society - creativity and originality don't loom large.

What's deceiving is that most of them actually look like the real thing - ie, they have a number of pages, big lettering and even some photos. But look closer - they're not like any tabloid we've ever read.

It's as if the Klingons have landed, taken over business and been told about corporate communications - but haven't quite got the hang of the English language. And now, alas, it's too late, as the world is full of house journals informing us that "ISO9000 Is the Way Ahead".

Or "Flattening of Hierarchies Equals Success". Or "Sales Department's Super Economy Situation!" Whether they're produced in- house (the only person in Human Resources who can use DTP for more than wedding stationery) or externally (the journalist who should know better), they can't but help ask if this is the real company they work for. We can't believe they're not nutters!

The office Christmas party where people either wore purple tinsel or vomited (or both) and the photocopier broke under the weight of human bodies becomes "A Popular Pickwickian Evening". And in the photo everyone is strangely vertical. The last wave of redundancies - surely a problem even in the world of perky feelgood - is miraculously spun into "Leaner and Fitter Than Ever. A New Era Begins..."

Is there a particularly tautologous report from the MD? That should definitely go in, especially as he or she will have the final veto as your very own Rupert Murdoch.

But let's not forget that your house journal wants to hear about you - photos of unrestrained bungee-jumping prove that people get to leave the office sometime, but mainly if they have suicidal tendencies. And those winsome head-and-shoulders promotions shots, if nothing else, show how popular the Marks & Spencer pussy-bow still is.

Visitors in reception or interviewees are sure to have a copy thrust upon them - your company has got to get rid of it somehow. And if you've really got nothing else to read apart from the Windows '98 manual it might serve a purpose.

But most people know that the best source of really interesting office news is where it's always been - whenever two or more of us go into the nearest toilet together.

It's definitely a better use of paper.

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.