NEWSPAPER PASTICHE EARNS RCL FEATURE
“Superb!” “Tops!” Say Critics

Breaking News And Weather
[Comedy] [Slice of Life] • 4,134 words

Rainbow Dash’s first sonic rainboom makes headlines across Equestria. Every reporter is out to cover the story from their own angle. Sometimes they get it partly right.

She’s going down in history. Maybe.

FROM THE CURATORS: We’ve featured epistolatory stories before, but this is something a little different. “It’s literally a series of newspaper front pages from shortly after Rainbow Dash did her first sonic rainboom,” Chris said, “showing a few different perspectives on what happened, and what followed.  The manner of presentation and the quality of execution are something we should showcase.”  We all agreed on that first impression.  “It’s certainly tops as presentations go,” Present Perfect said, and JohnPerry chimed in: “The presentation is superb.”

But despite the visual-arts triumph of its construction, we’re a fanfiction review group, and what earned Breaking News And Weather its feature was the sharp construction of its prose.  “It’s full of subtle and not-so-subtle wit — like the one student in the school paper who disagreed about the rainbow — and a steady eye toward worldbuilding and internal consistency,” Horizon said.  “It says a lot with details, like the less-than-scrupulous fact-checking with ‘Mr Rainbow Dash.’  Even without the newspaper formatting, it holds together as well as anything else we’ve spotlighted.”  JohnPerry also appreciated its depth: “I admired that you get a wider sense of this world beyond the main story.  The Cloudsdale strike made for a surprisingly compelling sub-plot.”

Add to that a clever critique of the news industry’s foibles, and you have a winner.  “The meta references to real-world papers are excellent, and the little details carefully woven in really made this one shine,” JohnPerry said, and Horizon agreed: “There’s a lot of marvelous content in the meta. … As a former newspaper editor, I might be biased, but this is one of my favorite stories on the site.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Pineta discusses blackboard shots, double-edged swords, and getting out of the house.
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