The Silvertongue Apple-Peal not coincidentally has a name similar to Silverton's recently deceased serious newspaper, the Appeal Tribune, which met its end in 2022 when the nearby Salem Statesman Journal stopped publishing it on the command of its corporate master, Gannett.
Thankfully, the Silvertongue Apple-Peal lives on since 2012, thanks to local gadfly Gus Frederick, who has come out with a new edition on the pleasingly languid schedule of every two years to mark a general or midterm election.
Our Town described Gus Frederick's effort in a story about the closing of the Appeal Tribune after 142 years.
Frederick said The Appeal-Tribune had a personal impact on him and his eventual career in multimedia. He said, during high school, he worked on page layout for Davis, and was hired during the summer as a photo lab technician.
“The Appeal was a great initial learning experience,” said Frederick. “And while everything I do nowadays (video, photography, publishing) is digital, the analog background I lived through not only exposed those principles in graphic detail, it also makes me greatly appreciate these new modern whiz-bang tools we have today!”
Frederick felt so inspired by his experience that, in 1987, he and friend Rick Ernst published The Silvertongue Apple-Peal, a spoof newspaper poking fun at local institutions in the style of MAD Magazine and National Lampoon. The paper was published every April 1 using then-state-of-the-art publishing software, but even with a yearly print cycle Frederick said his small staff became burned out and the spoof paper was discontinued after five years.
But The Apple-Peal made a surprise comeback in 2012, this time being published every other year and coinciding with major elections. Frederick admitted his political views “drift towards port,” but neither liberals nor conservatives are spared in this new iteration, with the 2022 issue expected to come out soon.
The 2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal is another work of creative pseudo-journalistic genius. I love every satirical bit of it, but am particularly struck by the ads, some of which I've shown below -- in part for the practical reason that my MacBook Pro laptop doesn't have a big screen, so I'm limited in the size of the screenshots I can capture and share.
Here's part of the 2024 front page, along with some favorite ads.
GIMME-ITT refers to Gannett, the much-despised owner of the Statesman Journal and many other newspapers in the country that Gannett uses as cash cows, laying off staff to reduce expenses and making as much money as possible from a paper before it is closed for good.
It's cool that the Silvertongue Apple-Peal has ads for related magazines.
Edgy but amusing ad.
Corny financial news plus bathroom humor directed at the Statesman Journal. Perfect!
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