The Avocado Post, and how it came to be like this
Being a statement of ownership, editorial policy, circulation and intent, published annually in accordance with a requirement we have imposed on ourselves.
The Avocado Post publishes satire and parody. Every article on this site is fiction. The events did not happen, the quotations were not said, and the statistics were invented. Where a real company, institution or public figure appears, they appear as the subject of comment and parody on their public conduct and their public statements, in a tradition considerably older than the internet. Nothing here is a factual assertion about any real person and nothing here should be read as one. The members of the public quoted in these pages do not exist. Photographs are stock or public-domain images used for illustration and do not show the events described.
That paragraph is the only one on this page our solicitor has read.
The paper
The Avocado Post was founded in MMXXVI by people who felt the existing press was insufficiently alarmed. It has published every week since, without interruption, apart from the weeks it did not.
The Post is produced from a building we refer to in these pages as the office. No member of staff has been to it. The address is held by our registered agent, who has been asked twice and has not replied.
Ownership and independence
The Post is owned in full by Avocado Holdings, which is owned in full by The Post. The structure was described by our auditor as circular and by our editor as independent, and both were paid.
We accept no advertising. This is a position of principle, arrived at in the fourth month of receiving no offers of advertising, and we intend to hold it for as long as it holds.
No proprietor has ever telephoned this newsroom to complain about a story. We have taken this as evidence of our independence rather than of our reach.
Editorial policy
We report on power, on the people who hold it, and on the increasingly confident machines they keep buying. We do not report on private individuals, on the dead who cannot answer, or on anybody having the worst week of their life. The powerful person's response to a disaster is our business. The disaster is not.
We are not going to print the word satire at the top of every page. The Onion argued that one at the Supreme Court and we are content to sit behind them.
House style permits no em dashes. The style guide gives no reason. The matter has been raised at three editorial meetings and is now closed.
Who writes it
Every issue of this paper is written by some combination of a person and a machine. We know the ratio to two decimal places. We are not going to tell you what it is, and we would ask you to notice that no other publication is telling you either.
Each piece therefore carries a note on its provenance which settles nothing, and ends with two questions. The first asks who you think wrote it. We will never confirm the answer, and the percentages we show you are invented, in line with the statistics elsewhere in the paper and for the same reasons.
The second asks whether it was better than the alternative. That one we read.
Our correspondents
None of the correspondents listed on the masthead exist. This was a cost measure and it has had no discernible effect on output. Their bylines accumulate, their job titles lengthen, and several have not been seen at the office since the restructure, which is difficult to establish either way.
Staff turnover at The Post is nil. Staff satisfaction is not measured, on the advice of the same solicitor.
The market
The ticker along the top of every page prices things that cannot be priced. The Doom Index is this paper's standing estimate of the chance that all of it ends, revised weekly for reasons that do not justify the revision. The remaining instruments are repriced by the subs on press night. None of the figures are real and neither are the instruments, which places our market roughly level with the others.
The idea is taken, with thanks, from Skynet Countdown, which does the same thing sincerely: it reads the artificial intelligence news every ten minutes, scores each story, and moves a real index on what it finds. Theirs is earnest. Ours is not. We read theirs daily and we recommend it.
Corrections and clarifications
The Post corrects everything. Nothing is quietly edited, every article keeps a dated address that will not move, and the whole paper sits beside this site in machine-readable form for the benefit of future historians, or of whatever is doing history by then.
In our issue of last week we described the end of the world as imminent. It was not. We apologise to readers who made arrangements.
An earlier version of this section stated that The Post corrects everything. This has been corrected.
Circulation
Our circulation is a matter of public record which we have elected not to make public. It is up.
Subscriptions
The digital edition is free and will remain so. The print edition costs six pounds and does not exist. The Patron tier is four thousand pounds a year, includes nothing, and has one subscriber, whom we have not been able to contact.
Awards
The Post has been shortlisted for no awards. It has given itself four, of which three were for the same piece, and the fourth for the decision to give itself the first three.
Complaints
Complaints are taken extremely seriously and are filed. If an article from this site reaches you with the notice stripped off it, and you believe for a moment that it might be real, that is a compliment to the writing and a small disaster for everybody, and we would like to hear from you before anyone else does.
The Avocado Post is written and edited in the United Kingdom. It has no owner worth naming and no proprietor worth fearing. Founded MMXXVI. Still going, at the time of writing.