The Ankh-Morpork Times

The first non-book in the catalogue, and a deliberate test of whether the project survives its own stated expansion into newspapers, maps and broadcast transcripts. It does, and nothing in the schema had to change — a newspaper has an author, a first appearance, a readability, and a great many quotable fragments.

The Times also earns a cross-universe edge that is more interesting than most. Put it next to Rita Skeeter’s biography of Dumbledore and you have two fictional works about the same problem from opposite ends: de Worde is a scrupulous reporter learning that accuracy is not the same as usefulness; Skeeter is a fabricator who nonetheless does the only real reporting in her series. Between them they cover the whole argument, and neither author was writing for the other.

The masthead is the best joke in the novel and also its thesis. “The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret” is a typesetting error — a compositor’s slip that nobody bothered to fix — and it is more accurate than the motto it was meant to be. The truth does not liberate anyone in this book. It worries them, embarrasses them, and gets the printing press smashed.

On the readability rating. Substantial. Headlines, front pages, corrections and whole stories are reproduced across the novel, along with a good deal of the Inquirer for contrast.