Fun With Acronyms / Print Media

• In 1992, James May was tasked to compile Autocar's Road Test Year Book, which was a series of car reviews with the first letter of each beginning with a large red initial. As he felt that the work was extremely boring, James arranged and edited the first few reviews so that their initials spelled "Road Test Year Book". However, he also arranged the other reviews such that, when proper punctuation is added in, their initials spelt "So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse." The latter was probably the reason why he was dismissed from the magazine after it went to print and readers started calling up the magazine thinking there might be a prize for being Genre Savvy.
• People who write to Dan Savage's sex advice column, "Savage Love", often pick a publication name which can be shortened into an acronym describing their problem. HELP, LOST, SCREWED, etc. He complained about it once, but the practice continues.
• An article about an improbable baseball pitcher in Sports Illustrated had the first letters of the words in the first sentence spell out APRIL FOOLS
  • The "Strange Universe" column in Sky and Telescope often has the first letters of each paragraph in the April issue spell out some sort of April Fools-related message.
• Famous tabloid magazine TMZ doesn't stand for anything by itself, but it is a sneaky reference to the Thirty-Mile Zone, a union rule that defines what counts as a local production for Hollywood-based studios (and thus requiring the studios to compensate film crews for their travel and accommodations when working outside of the zone).
• This trope is probably why Air and Space Smithsonian magazine is usually abbreviated as "A&S" or "A&S Smithsonian". Notably, when it moved to four-times—a-year publication as Air & Space Quarterly the editors showed no such reluctance to abbreviate it as "A&SQ”.
• Doctor Who Magazine:
  • A one-panel comic in one issue had the Brigadier being informed that UNIT were to be replaced with the International Defence Intelligence Operations Taskforce.
  • The final "Wotcha!" column, writer Nicholas Pegg having allegedly been let go as part of a purge of all critical content at the request of BBC Worldwide, had the first letters of each sentence form the acrostic "PANINI AND BBC WORLDWIDE ARE C*NTS". (Panini being the publishing company.)
• When Tony Blair was made UN Envoy to the Middle East, Private Eye had the Reverend Blair, former vicar of St Albions, become a missionary for the ecumenical organisation Drawing All Faiths Together.
• OWL magazine's title originally stood for Outdoors and Wild Life.

---