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TUESDAY MORNING: AT THE NEWSPAPER
The newspaper offices: glass interrupted by black-and-white horizontal lines. A young woman striding through the entrance disturbed the building’s impersonal design.
The city newspaper’s new publisher, Howell, was hand-picked representative of the billionaire venture capitalist who’d bought the 170 year-old legacy relic for ten percent of what it’d once been worth. Shortly after arriving in town and studying the operation, Howell had taken over editorial duties as well.
“We’re not doing journalism,” Howell told the staffers from behind a smartphone held in front of his face. “Journalism is dead. We’re not objective. Neither are we partisans. Our slant--our politics--is what sells.”
He’d done a stint in Silicon Valley as well as New York, and subscribed to the tech mindset. “Data, Then More Data!” his mantra, to the extent he had the slogan emblazoned in bold crimson-red letters on a large white banner hanging over the main entrance of their new, downsized headquarters.
Then he fired most of the long-time staff and brought in free-lancers and contract employees.
He was a thirty-nine-year-old arrogant cushion of a man wearing Warby-Parker eyeglasses, who’d been raised on video games and sci-fi CGI films. If it wasn’t electronic, he didn’t want it.
“The bottom line is views,” he told Dara Defiant when she arrived in his office to discuss a new assignment. “More views, subscribers, numbers, however we get them. More personalities, celebrities, drama. In this newspaper. On screens. Scandals. Targets. Triggers. Tragedy. Controversy.”
The office looked like it’d been erected yesterday, and would be gone tomorrow.
“That’s why I’m here,” Dara said with indecipherable eyes. “That’s what I write.”
As ruthless as he pretended to be, coddled Howell was intimidated by his encounters with Dara. When she walked, her figure cut through the atmosphere as if separate from it. Tangibly alive.
“What I like about you, Dara,” he said, blinking as he scrutinized her through his glasses (his eyes trained for screens, not people) “is you have no illusions.”
Dara thought to herself at age twenty-five maybe she should still have a few illusions.
"King" Karl Wenclas has a new novel out, The Loud Boys! I am happy to run an excerpt from it as part of drinkdrankdrunk! Check out his "War Hysteria" in The Underground Literary Alliance anthology and his current New Pop Lit project. Finding good contemporary writing can be difficult these days, so the King is a good guide to it, whether it's his own or that of others. He's also still blogging occasionally at Attacking The Demi-Puppets, trying to give American Lit. the jump start it so desperately needs these days!
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