A group calling themselves the Yes Men pulled off an elaborate prank yesterday, passing out over 1 million free copies of a very authentic-looking New York Times — only it was dated July 4, 2009, and its lead headline was “Iraq War Ends.” The BBC article noted the operation took six months of planning and many volunteers to pull it off. In a nod to the Times’ motto, the fake paper declared it contained “all the news we hope to print.”

One of those stories they hoped to print — on a website version that also faithfully recreated the real thing — was “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.” In too-broad brushstrokes, it speaks of well-financed PR giants hyping Philip Morris and selling Americans on going to war. I’m all for good satire, but bristled at this depiction of public relations.

The fake article includes a quote that’s particularly galling — “P.R. companies have been doing whatever it takes to maximize their profit.” That’s certainly news to me. Step inside my office and let me tell you a little about the PR I do.

I’m in the third year of running my firm. I help people who I know are deserving, hard-working people — authors, entrepreneurs, non-profit directors, and educators — get their message out to an audience ready to hear them via a media working on deadlines to deliver news. I talk to the media, but I also help my clients articulate their visions and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. By focusing on how they present themselves, they get a clearer sense of why they do what they do.

I have great days where I connect clients to reporters, resulting in stories that convey what I’d hope they’d convey. I have frustrating days where all my calls go to voicemail, where I lose a round of edits to a computer glitch, where I’m not as productive as I’d hoped to be. I had one banner day this summer where I stepped off the plane at JFK and my cell phone decided to die on the spot. (Just weeks before, I’d installed Skype. God bless Skype. Skype saved me until I could make it to a Sprint store and sit through a needlessly-elaborate reprogramming ritual, but that’s another story.) But I have never had a day where I have rubbed my hands together in Mr. Burnsian glee, plotting to maximize profits and dupe an unsuspecting nation.

Certainly, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on, there are plenty of things to be cynical about. But PR firms like mine — where I make my living on a love of all things media, my natural inclination to write, and sheer perseverance — are not one of those things to be cynical about. Especially not for people who tout themselves as the Yes Men.

You might have missed it among all the exciting election news of the campaign’s last few weeks — the Christian Science Monitor has decided to stop its print edition in April, becoming the first major newspaper in the U.S. to convert from print and online editions to online only. They’re even advertising a “treeless” subscription option to get readers used to the idea.

I still love the feel of a newspaper, and one of my favorite things to do on Sunday is to work through a Statesman or a New York Times section-by-section. But the reality is that I’m much more prone to read an article online these days than in the print edition. When a client does appear in a print edition, I’m thinking about some quality time with my scanner, whereas an online appearance by a client typically comes to me via Google Alert. The Monitor’s more a trendsetter than an anomaly, here, I’d think — it feels like we’re moving away from paper. Not immediately, of course, but it’s coming.