HONG KONG – The New York Times, which had previous disavowed any and all attachments to South Korea’s K-Pop scene for what it said was K-Pop’s “jejune” mollyprancing and insistence that their NYT Hong Kong fanboy staffers abide by an “overly dogmatic” skin-whitening regimen that would rid the staffers of any attachments to their wan, almost British-style complexions that clearly do not even approach the preferred Gangnam ’87-look that makes White people look like crumpled used undergarments in South Korea, has decided to move its entire Hong Kong editorial staff to Seoul so that they can more fully indulge their underlying Oedipal-RacialFawning complexes to their fullest extent in the Korean capital and also be closer to, and continue their cloying coverage of, Korean boy band Monsta-X, who by all media accounts are just great and totally unmatched in musical history.
In a statement, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet said that the move represented the NYT’s distinct branding strategy that focuses on bringing to the NYT international readership table a profoundly influential global mix of savvy Asia-focused editorial experience in a safe space that will allow the former Hong Kong editorial staffers to more fully explore both their journalistic boner-fides while at the same time seeing if sundubu-jjigae really works for them.
NYT Hong Kong staffer Darius Whittingblossom said the move had been long overdue and that the entire Hong Kong newsroom was so overjoyed at the possibility of moving to Seoul after multiple viewings of the Academy Award-winning Korean film “Parasite” that they would literally crawl through their cumulative student-loan debt to get there, even if it meant abandoning their treasured 160-square-foot US$2,600 apartments in Hong Kong to move into their infinitely more spacious yet decidedly more lugubrious 220-square-foot, US$2,195 apartments on offer in Seoul.
“This means the world to us,” said the 28-year-old Whittingblossom, who heads the Covid Impact Team in the NYT’s Hong Kong office. “This really has nothing to do with China, but to be sure was a considered, collective decision that the Hong Kong staffers would be better served in an environment that matches our life journeys and offers American-style entertainments like cheap booze and all the K-Pop we can possibly swallow wholesale while at the same time not overthinking why we all just couldn’t move to Taipei, which is way cheaper, has vastly superior street food, is far more geopolitically important and which we could have used as an intellectual fire-bombing base to really goad Beijing on the whole ‘China democracy’ front.”
“In some regards, our new Seoul base will serve as a petri dish of sorts to test whether the NYT brand can withstand a somewhat radical departure from the relentlessly status-quo-centric Hong Kong brand of international reportage and successfully segue to the relentlessly status-quo-centric Seoul brand of international reportage, but at a 14 percent discount,” Whittingblossom said.
“I’m really excited,” he added.
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