“This is a great time to be covering politics!” the Chief continued. “The White House is swimming in scandal and viewers have been loving it.” The 3D image lunged to one side of the stage. “But we can’t get complacent. Even scandals can get stale. We need to change it up.” The dragon jumped. “We have to lead the charge.” The dragon did a flip and flew straight up toward the ceiling. “We have to innovate—with new technology, like this hologram.” The dragon began to do loop-de-loops in the air, picking up speed as the Chief spoke until it was only a blur. “We need new approaches to take ATN all the way to number one!”

All at once the dragon vanished and the words ATN burned in flame above the Chief’s head.

The Chief continued, “To that end, I got my quant guys to break down the numbers. Here’s what we’ve learned—the news is making people sad.” The hologram paused and looked around the room, letting that sink in. “That’s a worrying trend. Increasingly our customers associate our brand with negative emotions. They’re tired of hearing us tell them awful things every day. They’re starting to tune us out.”

He turned and smiled a shade too enthusiastically. “Now, I’m not here to tell you what to do. You’re the journalists. I’m here to study at your feet.” He nodded at someone off-camera, then said, “But I want to share with you a secret weapon.” A crew of What Girls began to march importantly through the aisles like ring girls at a cage fight, handing out sheaves of paper.

MATT: Who are these angels?

MATT: I can’t believe I found my future wife here at work.

MATT: What is taking them so long to get to us? And what is it with handing out paper? I haven’t had a piece of paper since 1998.

“Assistants are handing out a document that will change your life and, if you embrace it and use it, will change our collective destiny. A team of top data scientists has developed a simple technique that will empower all of us to make our news more attractive to viewers. I believe this cheat sheet can help us reshape this network, supersize our ratings, and make news hot again.”

A What Girl bearing tree-pulp technology reached their row. Matt gazed at her euphorically. Natalie looked at the paper and nearly choked on her tongue.

The Chief said, “I present to you, the game changer. The secret weapon. Our List of Forbidden Words.” He turned and looked somewhere off-camera and said, “I thought we decided to call them Traffic Killers. I hate Forbidden Words, Larry, it sounds Chinese or something. I—”