Ryan Bautista | Layout Manager & Head Editor
May 22, 2026
Everyone in Newspaper hates how I write. Well, hate is a strong word. Let me reword it: everyone in Newspaper strongly dislikes and can’t understand why I write how I write. It isn’t really serious, it doesn’t have fancy vocabulary, and I use too many ellipses and asides. The editors get really annoyed when they see that they have to edit my articles, and it usually takes them a long time to do so. Well, since this is my final article in high school, I feel like I have to explain myself. Audrey, Ella, and Kat, I’m sorry. Let me explain why I have fun when I write.
Call it satire, stream-of-consciousness, tongue-in-cheek, or bad, writing with humor has been around for a while. Writers, if they want to, can experiment and take more chances with how they report news. This can be done by taking a past event and saying a certain person will do something similar–but even crazier–or taking…creative liberties in what is truly going on in the world. It is truly an art form, as these writers have to toe the line between being funny and being too mean, writing succinctly, and keeping a certain air of “professionalism.”
Unfortunately, the world has started clearing out this writing form. Fewer and fewer of the big newspaper companies are including satire pages or editions, resulting in them moving to their own platforms. The Onion is a prime example of this, where satire writing is the norm, and the only serious part of their website is the faces of politicians on thumbnails. Senior Liem Sidhu added on to this by describing how “all the funny stuff online is short-form, there’s almost no full-length articles anymore with the major news sites.” Sidhu brings up a good point, as this type of reporting has absolutely shifted to short-form content since it is viewed as a perfect medium to grab the short attention spans of young generations.
The world itself is also doing this industry no favors. First of all, it is getting harder and harder to playfully make fun of things without getting “cancelled.” Yes, sometimes jokes can go too far, but it seems like the line dividing good jokes from good but inappropriate jokes is slowly moving up and up. This is definitely good in some cases, like those regarding certain types of humor that were once considered appropriate but are absolutely not, but it can also be a bit of a buzzkill. The amount of ASB jokes I had to delete this year could fill a book, and I actually had a really good one about [REMOVED TO PRESERVE GRADUATION]. Where was I? Oh yeah, people getting sensitive. The same thing happens on a national scale, as a story meant as a small joke gets blown out of proportion and shared millions of times until people believe that it is real. It doesn’t help when the world we live in is so crazy that some absurd news stories are completely real and require no humor adjustment to be considered insane. Let me give you some examples: The U.S. has recently…nope, I’m staying out of politics on this article. OK, a robot has just been invented that has mastered the art of peeling kiwis with its feet, the newest TikTok phenomenon involves people mimicking an emperor penguin, and a new species of carrot is bright teal instead of orange. These stories are not real. And yet, they could absolutely be the next headline to scroll across your phone screen. On top of that, thanks to AI, all of these stores now have realistic photos convincing you that what you are reading is true. Senior Cocean McAlister agreed with this sentiment and also noted that “the AI photos have almost replaced the need for longer articles since they can show the entire story in an image.” Some people agree with this and say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what good is a generated picture that looks so bad when the alternative is a clever, witty newspaper article?
Beyond all of this lies a final point: news stories tend to focus on the bad. Whether that be a new war or someone famous just died, the clickbait nature of bad news makes all the news companies focus on reporting the bad. But sometimes, people need that little smile in their day. Even if it’s just a small smirk at a really bad pun I made about baseball, I want people to have something to read that isn’t so dark, serious, and formal. So yeah, my writing can be really annoying. But I prefer that over being the twentieth person writing about a murder case or how AI is taking over the world. I hope that someone else in Newspaper will take up this mantle next year, and if they need any advice, all I can say is this: write however you want, and don’t let the Editors-in-Chief force you out of doing it.
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