The latest chapter in Coma News Daily’s 100-year-old tradition of being “both in love and at war with its prior self,” began Monday with the hiring of a new editor-in-chief.
An exhaustive–and exhauting– search for a new editor that lasted at least a week and a half resulted in the hiring of S. Michael Knight.
“This newspaper’s most important survival skill has been to attract new champions from beyond its inner sanctum,” said Davis Montgomery, publisher of Coma News Daily.
Knight will take the place of Don Johnson Michaels, a beloved editor who dissappeared in January after obsconding with one of his employer’s prize ponies. Montgomery noted that a $50,000 reward remains available for information that leads to the return of his pony.
Knight, who is recovering from a stroke, will communicate with his staff through his wife Maeve Knight-Ryder.
When pressed by a Coma News Daily reporter on the logistical challenges of such a non-traditional arrangement, Montgomery said “it’s the thinking that matters, not the form in which it is conveyed.” The newspaper also is likely to cease publication of its print edition, he said.
Contacted for comment, Knight’s wife said the new editor hopes to bring to bear 20 years of experience writing for the Obituary section of the New York Times and car advertorials for the Lansing Standard.
“If this publication is to be influential, and not merely survive, it can no longer afford to represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites,” Knight-Ryder said for Knight.
When asked who the “elites” were, Knight-Ryder said only that Knight planned to focus “less on facts of what this town is and more on the hopes and dreams of what it could be.”
Robert McGuiness, a former reporter for Coma News Daily and local media critic, said in an interview at Bear’s Biker Bar that he hoped that the new leadership would help the paper revert to its former role as a trenchant champion for truth.
“and if that doesn’t work they can bring me back.” He then pointed at himself and belched.
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