Martians kidnap journalism students

Martians spirited away an entire class of journalism students this week – leaving tutors baffled and bewildered.

The 20-odd students (note the distinctive use of the hyphen) were last seen happily working at their desks.

“When we opened the newsroom first thing Monday morning, it was empty,” journalism tutor Richard Walker says.

“I can’t understand it, I had yet to explain what a feature was, and they’d all disappeared. It’s such a pity really, especially as my colleague Charles Riddle had taught them nothing all semester.”

Walker said the disappearance would affect production of the highly successful course publication, Waikato Independent, over the Christmas period.

“It’s a shame. The paper had just cracked 100,000 pageviews and we were looking forward to releasing an expose on Father Christmas which one of the missing students had been working on.”

The disappearance comes within months of the Christian Science Monitor reporting in-depth on the discovery of life on Mars.

Police liaison officer Senior Sergeant Lauren Order said they did not believe there was a link between the Independent’s investigative journalism and the disappearance of the class.

“It’s definitely Martians. You can always tell, there’s muckraking and this slime everywhere at the scene.”

Tutors are busy recruiting a new body of students and hope to have the Waikato Independent up and running again in February.

“It’s frustrating. Good students are hard to find and it takes ages before they understand the finer points of the apostrophe. But we will be back in February, the Mayan calendar permitting,” Walker said.