I hesitated to say anything yesterday because I was unsure my interpretation of the Tribune Co.’s  April Fool’s Day offering was in line with reality.

Employees and anyone who reads the PR Newswire will recall receiving an email about a “new Tribune product” that would revolutionize modern communication and eclipse the Internet itself in significance.  Here is the whole document: accelerator.

Here’s how it started: 

Tribune Company today announced detailed plans to introduce a high-power, low-cost communications device designed to make all media, including the Internet, obsolete by next year. The device, tentatively being marketed as “The Accelerator, TM” uses patent-pending nano-technology to aggregate the sum of all human knowledge—everything from where you put your keys last night to the genetic sequence of field mice DNA—and deliver what you want, when you want, directly into your brain. A prototype of the device and a description of its features can be found on the company website at www.tribune.com.

It goes on in that vein and is mildly amusing, especially if you don’t know anything about Tribune or its financial problems.  It went out onto the Internet, too, as an official Tribune press release. There was no disclaimer that it was an April Fool’s joke, but anyone with more than one quarter of a wit would realize that by the time he or she got through the first paragraph.

My first reaction to the item was not amusement.  I thought it a little insulting and adolescent that someone in Chicago was writing an April Fool’s joke when everywhere else throughout the company — in Chicago, LA, Hartford, Baltimore, Fort Lauderdale, you name it — there was too much real work to do and few people to do it.  I found myself wondering how much money the main office wasted on (to be generous) an effort to lift peoples’ spirits, when there is so little money to go around.

But I chalked my reaction up to oversensitivity. Why blow a little fun out of proportion?

Then  I visited the Courant office on Wednesday and found plenty of support for my first reaction. The folks there are in no mood for jokes — at least corporately produced jokes. (I wonder what the creditors think.)

I doubt anyone at Tribune headquarters was April foolish enough to tell the Emperor that his jester’s efforts were misdirected and in bad taste. 

So I’m telling him now.