Projects

Bombotalk

Satirical daily

A satirical daily built around a single character. One issue a day in full news costume — written and typeset by an automated newsroom.

bombotalk.cz
Front page — sections, issue number and fact box
Issue archive
9:41
“A car that looks like a fridge that got itself a driving licence.”
Issue no. 1: I am a motorist. Who represents me?
Why it exists

Search moved, and writing for keywords stopped paying

The informational content that fed publishers for years now gets answered inside the results page and never earns the click. At the same time the things an answer box cannot replace got sharply stronger — freshness, recommendation and a recognisable brand.

Bombotalk bets on exactly that side. The original value is not information but one character’s experience: a field reporter broadcasting from his own living room. That does not summarise.

  1. −42 %

    organic clicks

    across 64 publisher sites against the pre-AI-answers baseline.

  2. +103 %

    fresh news

    precisely for content that ages within hours.

  3. +30 %

    Discover

    the recommendation feed caught up with classic search volume.

  4. −58 %

    click-through on top spot

    wherever a summary sits above the results.

What it does

The joke is in the mismatch

The site talks like a newsroom, the texts like him

Issue numbers, sections, a fact box with a verified figure, a poll in the sidebar. The more seriously the apparatus dresses, the better it works — because inside sits a guy who just found out he has a political party.

bombotalk.cz
An issue with a drop cap and a sidebar poll

An archive and files nobody can clone

Every issue gets a number and stays. Companies and agencies mentioned often enough grow their own file; so does the author. A competitor cannot start this layer — it has to be lived through.

Issue archive
9:41
Every issue carries a number and a date
9:41
Decisions

What we did differently

An automated newsroom tempts you to flood the place. Almost everything here is a brake against that.

One issue a day, never more

Publish as much as the machine can produce.

Exactly one issue a day.

The spring search update aimed straight at content made at scale — sites with hundreds of unreviewed articles fell by fifty to eighty percent. Volume is the one variable fully under our control, so we capped it.

The glossary and entity files grow alongside, but an order of magnitude slower.

Never accuse a named person

The headline anyone would write: "X hit an ambulance."

A joke that claims nothing.

Asserting guilt about a named person while the investigation is still open is not a joke, it is legal exposure. And the better joke sits one floor up anyway: for that crash it was enough that the man was honorary chair of the Motorists and the government Green Deal envoy, in an off-road Mercedes. The material writes itself and accuses no one.

The rule is tested against a real case, not an invented example.

Czech only, no English edition

Add English to widen the market.

Czech, exclusively.

English satire is saturated, the Czech space nearly empty, and models handle Czech considerably worse. Culturally anchored humour does not translate either. And the formats that rest on history — entity files, poll issues, a filled archive — cannot be copied, because they cannot be bought.

Built on

Payload as the editorial system, Meilisearch over the archive. Issues and social posts are assembled by scheduled automation.

Next.js 16
Payload CMS 3
PostgreSQL
React 19
Tailwind v4
Meilisearch

Content, automation and social are things we do for clients too — social media management