Peston’s Colleagues Call for Bailout of Journos

Freemania captures the essence of the media's problems:

"The journalistic industry is perilously close to collapse after running out of days in the week to dub 'black' in the event of dire economic news.

Financial journalism has virtually frozen up after last week's so-called 'Black Friday', which exhausted the stock of slightly varied clichés. Reporters were close to panic last night at the prospect of having unimaginatively to sensationalise any further stock-market falls this week.

The Government has been considering opening the markets at the weekend, in order to provide two new potential 'black' days for the media to gibber in horror about, but industry insiders are calling for much more radical moves.

One broadsheet business editor said: "The only thing that can avert journalistic meltdown now is for the Government to create extra days. We've used the ones we have to full effect, and then some, but the need for just one more doom-mongering headline could bring the system crashing down around us. Just knowing there were more days available would steady nerves, whether we needed to use them or not."

Downing Street is understood to have commissioned a study of Norse gods to gauge the scope for new day names. But proposals for an emergency injection of days into the week have met with scepticism from Church leaders, schoolchildren and calendar-makers.

The recent American bailout plan, which involved holding the number of days in the week constant but associating several new colours with bad news, only led to further panic. And an Icelandic initiative, in which the country's Government proposed flooding the media with 50 trillion new days – more than have passed in the history of the universe – was poorly received.

Confidence in the media has fallen to record lows in the face of a string of near-identical reports shrieking about the economy's implosion. The Evening Standard has been hit particularly hard, having been reduced to using the front-page headline 'Black Yesterday' for four days in succession."