Strand Publications Inc. closed its deal today with the University of Toronto Engineering Society to purchase its monthly newsletter, the Toike Oike (pronounced To-ee-kee Oh-ay-ki). The acquisition follows a trial issue of the Toike, wherein The Strand’s April 2015 Joke issue was reprinted under the Toike’s masthead with less original content and—most noticeably—worse jokes. The experiment was conducted in an attempt to increase readership of The Strand among those who delight at the sight of dick jokes and tired, trite stereotypes about liberal arts students.
The Strand now has access to a team of over nine people capable of making graphs accompanying news and opinion pieces by doing cool tricks in Microsoft Excel.
Strand Co-Editor-in-Chief Anthony Burton highlighted the Toike’s managerial structure as a key asset in the acquisition.
“Sometimes, we get an overload of people with creative and original ideas, so much so that they sometimes clash,” he said over the phone in an interview. “The genius of the Toike is in not using people with any original ideas whatsoever. It’s unorthodox, for sure, sticking exclusively to a group of people not used to, or necessarily good at, doing this sort of thing. But the total lack of debate and ideas exchanged makes for a really cooperative and efficient newsroom, like an ant colony but less significant.”
The purchase is part of Strand Publications Inc.’s overall plan to move towards forms of new digital media. The newspaper recently launched a website and has been working to find ways to create web-exclusive content while maintaining the journalistic integrity of the printed edition.
“[The engineering students] will be unquestioningly doing grunt work in huge corporate structures for the rest of their lives,” Burton noted when asked about his plans for the newly-hired staffers. “It’ll be a huge boon to our paper to have some people who are used to just fleshing out whatever half-baked idea you throw at them.”
Copies of the Toike’s issue can be found on their respective newsstands. Copies of the original Strand issue can be found at issuu.com/thestrandpaper, but you have to go way back to find it.
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