The Telegraph has suffered an exodus of seasoned reporters yet there is good news on the horizon: the paper is hiring no fewer than five new “social media and search engine optimisation” staff. They will be working with “Director of Digital Media” Malcolm Coles to produce more of the Telegraph’s recent tepid Buzzfeed-style “trending news” content:

• Study on penises reveals the average size… and it’s smaller than you think

• Man with two penises writes tell-all memoir

• Who really ever owns a tweet? The story of a 140-character message gone viral, and the man who stole it

• If Queen Bey can do it, then so can we! (Create the best avatar you’ll ever have)

• There was a Nando’s in 18th-century London where people went for banter

• Want to win a tweet from Lord Sugar? Enter this competition run by Apprentice winner

• The funniest times parents copied their children’s embarrassing selfies

• Can you spot this Victoria’s Secret Photoshop fail?

• Man ‘uses raccoon to get around a breathalyser and is then attacked by it’

Trained reporters on the paper are furious to the point of mutiny. They feel they bring in the stories that fill the paper and generate most of the online traffic, yet their work is diluted by the outpouring of ‘digital friendly’ clickbait about male genitalia and cheeky Nando’s ‘banter’. The newsroom feeling is that Telegraph execs don’t have a clue about how the internet works, and that the policy of hiring Mirror Online rejects to create limited, low level traffic rather than proper journalists doing real stories is vandalising their newspaper. The once proud paper of Bill Deedes, Charles Moore and Max Hastings is now more likely to tell you about Photoshop fails, cutesy animal pictures and whether or not you have an above-average sized willy…