FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APRIL 24, 2008

BOSTON, MA — Wednesday, April 23rd marks an important event in the history of the print medium: the day the internet came to ink.

Boston’s Weekly Dig, the irreverent, independent alt-weekly of The Hub joined forces with ROFLcon, the Harvard-sponsored, M.I.T.-housed convention of internet memeologists, to form an extra-special issue of content, concepts and context that brings the wide wide webterland to the printed page.

When the Dig became the official media sponsor of the soon-to-be-legendary gathering, they decided to do something extra-special. As it happened, that week’s issue was also the Spring Dining Guide — and so a cover was born: NOM NOM NOM. The feature consists of a review of area cheeseburgers: I Can Has Cheezburger.

It doesn’t stop there. Throughout the entire issue, LOL-speak trumps headlines, memes are sprinkled liberally and fake ads were applied. There’s an interview with World of Warcraft legend Leeroy Jenkins, a selection of top memes from ROFLcon attendees and a few LOLcats, of course. The internet experts brought their memes and the Dig brought the funny. The paper even went as far as hiring a LOLbudsman to ensure the usage of the internet jargon was properly applied. The staff even came up with a word for the procces: to “ROFLize” is to take a normal news story and apply internet-speak. As in “Has ‘News to Us’ been ROFLized yet?” The result was a paper that baffled readers, encouraged more than a few letters (“stop with the Cyber Talk!” said one) and went much further than w00t.

It marks a day when print laid down its blunted sword, when it began to accept the internet.

Late Monday afternoon, the Dig received a rather frantic call from the printing press.

“Are you sure you want to go to print with this?” The plant said before running the presses.

“Why?” We asked.

“Because there are spelling errors on almost every single page!!”

LOL.

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