Requiem for the Chronicle

(This is a piece of fiction written for a class I took on short stories—inspired, though, by my experiences in the real world of dying newspapers.)

I knew Dani Adams meant trouble, even before she walked into the newsroom, even before she had a name. I knew because of the way Tim O’Shea stabbed the email from corporate to the bulletin board, his thumbtack a poison dart. “Fresh Faces, Fresh Ideas Summer Intern Program,” the subject line said.

Tim is my boss. He has a curly gray-white beard and carries himself like Santa’s world-weary brother. He barks as his drill sergeant taught him to, decades ago. He’s been editor of the Riverton Chronicle for forty-four of his seventy-two years, long enough to remember when Joy Manufacturing ran two shifts and the bars and beauty parlors were always busy. Joy is long gone now, the jobs moved South, but Tim, he’s not going anywhere. He’ll die in his job, unless the trials of these times kill his paper first. He is the Chronicle. I love the man. 

He doesn’t think much of fresh ideas, though, and he thinks even less of corporate.

Dani bounced into the newsroom two weeks later, half energy drink, half superball. She wore her hair shaved on the sides, long on top, tinted purple. I’ve seen taller kids at bus stops, wearing baggy shorts and shivering in the cold. She set a framed selfie of her roommates by the old Rolodex on her desk and deposited her tub of hummus in the wheezing lunchroom fridge, next to a withered slice of pepperoni pizza. She came to us after her third year at Amherst, from the midst of the college cluster downriver that Tim called the Land of the Loopies. She was editor of the "Virtual Mammoth," the student news blog. 

She was corporate’s choice, not Tim’s.

“Christ will you look at that,” Tim said to me as he took her in. Everyone else had their eyes on her, too. Pete in Sports combed his hair with his fingers, sat up straight and tried not to stare. Dieter emerged unbidden from his IT cave to log her in to the network. Gladys, the newsroom clerk, white-haired and stooped, smiled as she gave Dani a reporter’s notebook and two pencils, called her “dear,” then pointed to the sharpener. 

“What in hell are we going to do with her?” Tim said.

Tim hired me as a reporter thirty years ago, fresh out of the Navy. My father taught high school history in Allensville, another mill town that fell sooner and landed even harder than Riverton. Now I’m Tim’s managing editor, his righthand man. We begin each day together in his glass-walled office, marking up the morning’s paper—a check in blue marker by a clever headline or a strong lede, an angry red circle around every typo. Keeps the night desk on its toes.

“Eliot’s on vacation,” I said. “I was thinking cops and courts for this week. See what she’s got.”

Tim nodded. “Sink or swim,” he said. “Check her copy.”

Dani was back in the newsroom just after lunch to write her first story: a 911 call to the park for a pit bull that slipped its leash and got into it with a dog walker, two shih tzus and a labradoodle. She returned a second time just before the evening news meeting with a quick feature on the first female cop to win the department’s yearly fitness test. These were departures from the norm. Eliot’s stories almost always involved someone scuzzy doing something bad to another scuzzy and landing in court again. The underbelly beat, Tim calls it.

Two stories on her first day, and she took her own pictures. She stood at my side as I read both pieces.

They were clean. “Nice job,” I said.

“Tell me how they can be better,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Even now journalism profs push their kids to small-town papers like the Chronicle for real-world training. Nothing teaches accountability quite like seeing the cop you just profiled in the coffee shop the next morning, taking crap from the regulars about your story. 

“They could be longer,” I offered. “Go into more detail.”

“Why? Does anyone read past the jump, to the end?”

“Sure they do,” I said. “If they’re interested, they do.” 

By “they” I suppose I meant me, because there’s no telling what actual newspaper readers do. Besides the crossword puzzle, which actual readers do every day, as we learn on the mornings we accidentally leave it out. Phones ring off the hook.

Tim put the pit bull rumble in the local section, inside, and buried the female cop on the Neighbors page, where press releases go to die.

“No fluff,” he said.

“It’s a good read, Tim. The cop, she was a Marine. Two tours in Iraq.”

He grunted, which was his way of saving words for things he wanted to talk about. 

Next morning Tim emerged from his office and spoke to Dani for the first time. He had no choice. Tim always gave new hires the tour on their second day and here she was, back for her second day. She wore tight pink jeans with white sandals. Tim’s tie rested on his ample belly like it was a recliner. He owned three ties and rotated two of them, preserving the one without grease stains for special occasions. This was not a special occasion. I resisted the urge to chaperone.

Like Riverton, the building is showing its age, with ceiling tiles yellowed like coffee teeth and bathrooms that look their best with the light off. Abandoned wires strung for long-forgotten purposes dangle from the ceiling like so many cobwebs. Tim cherished every corner of the place. He could talk for ten minutes about the sprinkler system. In the press room he’d go on for forty, intoxicated by the smells of oil and ink. 

This time he came back to his office fuming. “She wanted to know how fast circulation was falling, for chrissake,” he sputtered. 

“How’d it go?” I asked Dani ten minutes later, after I calmed Tim down. 

“It’s like a living museum,” she said. “Really cool.”

“What’d you think of the press?” My God how I loved the sound of that beast as it awakened and began to roll. The thrill of bending to pick one of the first papers off the conveyor belt as it sped past, then opening it to scan the headlines for typos—that never faded. Not a bit, not even after all these years.

She shrugged. “It’s big, isn’t it?”

~~~

I hoped we would escape the first week without the two really getting into it, but then I’m an optimist. On Friday morning Dani came bounding into the newsroom with her iPhone held high. “Car fire at the 91 on-ramp!” she said. “Traffic backed up half a mile! I got video!”

“Oh my,” said Gladys. Pete sat up straight again. He was wearing a new shirt. Dieter, he stayed in his cave.

Tim stood at the bulletin board, posting the day’s marked-up pages. 

“Brief it,” he said. “By the time we’re on the street tomorrow no one will care.”

“I got flames!” she said. “We should post it to the website!”

“We’re a newspaper,” Tim said. “Print first.”

“We could Tweet it.”

“We don’t Tweet.”

“Who doesn’t Tweet? Everyone Tweets.”

They stared at each other.  “We’re a newspaper,” Tim said. “Not a fucking TV station.”

Dani’s face reddened. She might have melted, this being her first week. But I could see she was on the verge of saying something she’d regret. So could Tim, who reddened too. He placed his hand on the front page, pinned to the board, his fingertips just below the masthead—The Riverton Chronicle—and tapped the paper twice. 

“Do you even read a newspaper?” he said. It was an accusation.

She held up her phone again. “I read the news,” she said. “All day. Every day.”

“You work at a goddamn newspaper now,” Tim said, his tone rising. “A goddamn good one. Read the goddamn newspaper.”

Dani shoved her phone in her hip pocket, grabbed her notebook and her yoga mat, turned on her heel and blew out of the room. Everyone watched her go, then everyone looked to Tim. No one moved. No one said a word. 

“Read the goddamn newspaper!” Tim shouted toward the empty door.

I waited until noon before sticking my head in his office. “Lunch?” I said.

We walked down Main Street and its old brick buildings to Myrtle’s Diner, passing city hall, the courthouse, the tired old tattoo parlor and the new taco place on our way. The line for tacos stretched out the door. At Myrtle’s we settled into our usual booth by the window—no waiting—and ordered our usual lunch. Myrtle loaded Tim’s plate with fries.

“Give Dani a chance, would you?” I said. 

Tim grunted through a mouthful of burger.

“I like her,” I added. “She reminds me of Anna.” This was playing hardball, at least by my standards. Anna was my daughter, UMass, reading specialist, 23. Tim was her godfather.

He shook his head. “Anna knows how much she doesn’t know,” he said.

“You didn’t know how much you didn’t know either, once upon a time,” I said. “You turned out alright.”

Another grunt. “Where in hell was she going with that yoga mat?” he said.

“Sunshine Wellness, probably.”

“In Riverton?”

“Depot Street. In the old Cabot’s Shoes place. Next to the mountain bike shop, where Unique Antiques used to be.”

This time, a snort. “I give it two months.”

He pushed his empty plate aside and signaled Myrtle for a refill. “I got an email from corporate, first thing this morning,” he said. “Advertising missed budget again. One more bad month and we cut. No questions asked.”

Old corporate meant the Drysdales, who lived in a shaded Victorian on Elm, the one with the turret and a wraparound porch. When old man Drysdale couldn’t sell his kids on running a newspaper in Riverton, he sold to new corporate in Chicago instead and retired to Arizona, leaving us to fend for ourselves. New corporate had a plan: snap up small papers at bargain prices and squeeze them to the last penny. The elevator in their high-rise must not stop on our floor, because no one from new corporate ever visited Riverton. New corporate was big on appearances, like intern programs, because no one likes being hated by everyone. But facts were facts: To new corporate, the Chronicle was just a cell in a spreadsheet. And it was red.

“Shit,” I said. We’d lost two reporters, a photographer and a night editor in the eighteen months since the old man sold. “Again? How much?”

“One position—this time. It’s a fucking death march.”

I pulled Dani aside that afternoon. She managed to look defiant and frightened at the same time.

“Sorry about this morning,” I said. “You okay?”

“I’m okay. I get yelled at a lot. My dad and I, we don’t get along either.”

A pause. “Do I still have a job?” she added.

“You still have a job. That’s just Tim. You’ll get used to it. Look—have you noticed his limp?”

She nodded.

“He graduated from high school straight into Vietnam. Walked into the recruiter’s office and volunteered for infantry, like his dad after Pearl Harbor. Different war, different story, but he put his ass on the line just the same.”

Another nod. “Got his ass shot first night of the Tet Offensive,” I added. 

“I took a class on Vietnam,” Dani said. “Post-Colonial Imperialism.” 

“He came home, got a job at the Chronicle taking sports scores at night. Six months later, Joy bolted for South Carolina. Just closed up, overnight. His dad worked there his whole life, in the machine shop. Blindsided. He died that Christmas.”

She was listening.

“Put Vietnam and Joy together and you’ve got Tim. He doesn’t take any bullshit from powers that be. Neither does the Chronicle.”

“I like that, I do,” she said. “So who handles your Facebook?”

“Gladys.”

“Gladys? She’s like 90.”

“She’s the only one with time for it.” These days, the obits and letters to the editor she’d spent years typing up came mostly by email. “She updates the website every day at 9, posts a feature photo to Facebook.”

“Just once a day? The web?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure we can’t post my video? To Facebook, not the website. We’ll get tons of shares.”

“What’s in it for us, shares? Any revenue?”

“No. Just shares—engagement.”

That’s the thing about the Internet: all buzz, no money—at least none that our ad reps can find. Of course the three of them started here before I did. They may not know where to look.

“Gladys has never done video,” I said.

“I’ll show her,” said Dani. 

That seemed safe enough. Tim would never notice. He didn’t even have an account. “Sure, to Facebook.” That’s my role, finding the middle ground. Someone’s got to hold things together.

“I’m going to put you on city hall,” I said. “Night meetings. Two nights on city hall and two nights on the desk. You okay with that, working nights?”

“Sure,” she said. “It’s all learning.”

“Do me a favor? Just cover the meetings.”

“Sure. I can do that.”

“I’ll give you the Wednesday Biz page. Day shift. Write it, desk it. It’s yours.”

“Great.” She turned to go.

“And Dani?” I said. She paused in my office door. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed the stud in her nostril before. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

She offered an empty smile. “Thanks,” she said.

~~~

I went home thinking job well done. I’m not saying it turned into the Summer of Love or anything, but Tim and Dani settled into something like a simmer. She didn’t listen to me, not entirely, because she didn’t just cover the meetings. And if Tim could find the tiniest thing to fault in her work, he’d do it. But putting her on nights pretty much kept her out of his line of sight, and that was good for everyone’s blood pressure.

“It’s farther, not further,” he muttered one morning as he read one of her council stories from the night before. 

“Christ, Tim,” I said. “She filed three pieces in sixty minutes. And we made deadline.”

“Physical distance. It’s farther.” A circle of red.

For his Sunday column the week after, Tim wrote a remembrance of Joy’s final employee summer picnic. He played horseshoes with his dad that day, beat him for the first time with a ringer on his final toss. Dani brought the column into my office on Monday. 

“I wondered,” she said, “if you think readers would rather look forward than back.”

It wasn’t really a question, so I didn’t really answer. It. “Hey!” I said. “You’re reading the paper!”

She profiled the gay lawyer—it was right there in his press release—when he announced his candidacy for the Ward 1 council seat. That’s the section of town closest to Amherst, where he practiced. Tim couldn’t find a mistake to mark in the piece but grunted just the same. “In Riverton? He’s got no chance,” he said. I wasn’t sure. “Ward 1 went for Bernie, remember?” I said.

One morning an earthquake in Mongolia leveled a mountain village and killed everyone in it. I’d never say this in church, but shit like that happens somewhere no one’s heard of at least once a week. Dani, on the night desk, threw out the World & Nation template for a full-on photo page, like it was 9/11 or something. 

The next morning Tim gave off sparks. “Jesus Christ! Where’s the stock chart?”

“I dunno,” I said. “But the phone’s not ringing. Maybe you’re the only one who reads the stock chart.”

“Just use the fucking template. Tell her.”

Truth is, I liked most of what I saw in Dani. Good work, and good for morale too. She taught Gladys to emoji. She inspired Pete to eat salad for lunch at his desk. When the network crashed, Dieter lingered a little longer in the newsroom, and always checked to make sure Dani was back online. When Jen on the night desk caught her toddler’s pink eye and called in sick, Dani came in on the Fourth of July to pick up her shift. Back on his underbelly beat, Eliot wrote a feature on two cops who hosted an ice cream social in a subsidized housing project. It’s not like the newsroom switched sides on Tim or anything, but Dani, she held everyone’s attention.

Maybe Tim liked a little of what he saw too. When councilors awarded a no-bid printing contract to the mayor’s cousin, Dani got his honor on the phone and wrote it up. The mayor called Tim to bitch. Tim replied that he didn’t recall the mayor campaigning on a pledge to line his cousin’s pocket. Then he got out his marker and scoured her story until he found a stray comma. He circled it in red.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not putting her up for a Pulitzer. She was 21 and moved fast. She was bound to screw something up, and she did. When property tax bills were mailed, she misplaced a decimal and wrote a story that doubled the actual increase. Her math made no sense, but she didn’t know better. All hell broke loose. The phones exploded, on everyone’s desk, even Pete’s in Sports, and at city hall too.

Which is one reason I love Tim. If the shit starts flying, he’s got your back. No matter who you are, no matter how he feels about you. He spent an hour fielding calls before waving Dani and me into his office. Her face was as white as her Amherst tank top.

“So what happened?” he said.

“I thought the tax rate was thousands,” she said. “It was hundreds.”

“Who did you ask about it?”

“I didn’t ask anyone. I thought it was a stupid question.” She flinched, awaiting the storm.

“The stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask,” Tim said quietly. He’d taught the same lesson to dozens of rookie reporters through the years, including me. “Call the mayor. Call the tax collector. Be straight with them. Write the correction. Then go find a story and get this one right.”

~~~

Dani’s final week at the Chronicle began with the lid still sitting on our simmering pot, and I thought it might just stay there. It felt like forever since the blowup. But then again, I’m an optimist. We’ve established that already.

On Tuesday morning Tim got the email from corporate. July ad numbers were off again, and circ dropped more than budgeted. Cut a position now. Plan to cut spending in the fourth quarter by twenty percent more if we couldn’t get back to black.

“Fucking pencil heads,” Tim said. 

“What do we do?” I replied. We both knew the answer.

“It’s got to be Gladys.”

At least she had a pension. Medicare, Social. She’d be okay, once she got over the shock.

“Can we wait until Monday?” I said. I’m one to put off a hard conversation if I can. “I need to figure out who can pick up her work.”

So that was our Tuesday. Bad enough. Then Wednesday delivered Dani’s last Biz page of the summer—and a surprise along with it, plastered right across the top in big, bold type.

“Riverton on the Rise,” her headline said. “New Businesses Flee High Amherst Rents, Give Old Downtown a Lively New Vibe.”

I winced. I didn’t feel any better when I read the lede.

“Move over Myrtle’s,” the story began. “There’s a new taco joint in town—and that’s not all.”

The idea, the headline, the lede, the story, the pictures—all Dani’s. She must have been gathering string for weeks. She quoted the excited owners of new businesses. She quoted realtors and landlords and the artists renting cheap lofts in the old Joy machine shop, where Tim’s father had worked. She quoted young moms in the park with their babies, yoga classmates with jobs downriver in Tim’s Land of the Loopies, even the owner of Reinvention, a boutique and smoothie bar in Amherst. The owner had just signed a lease to relocate—here.

I read it twice. I couldn’t find a question she didn’t ask.

But the Riverton on Dani’s page wasn’t Tim’s Riverton. It wasn’t my Riverton either. It wasn’t the place I knew. It wasn’t even a place I visited. Where were the vacant storefronts, the machines gone silent, the company picnics, the bars and the beauty parlors? 

It’s not like the sidewalks were pulsing with shoppers, like the old days.

It’s not like parking was hard to come by, like the old days.

It’s not like the semis were lugging in rolled steel and lugging out pickup truck frames, water heaters, and guardrails. Like the old days.

If Riverton was rising, why wasn’t the Chronicle rising with it?

Tim summoned me to his office before I reached my desk, and he slammed his door behind me. The glass in his window walls shook.

“What the fuck?!? I told you to check her copy!”

“That was June, Tim. It’s August.”

“She drank the Kool-Aid, that’s what she did. And you let it happen! And now we own it, this blow job of a story.”

Tim’s phone rang, and he glanced at the number. “That’d be Myrtle,” he said. “You call Dani. Now. Get her in here.”

Here’s the odd thing. By the time Dani was standing beside me in Tim’s office, he’d cooled off a good bit. Myrtle had said she’d noticed a few new faces in her diner too. One asked for a veggie burger; had Tim ever tried one? The mayor had called to ask why he hadn’t been quoted. And Gladys had told me Dani’s video tease got 231 likes and 57 shares on Facebook. “A lot of hearts,” she said. “Most ever.”

Tim held the page in front of Dani’s eyes. “Where did this crap come from?” he said.

She did not falter. “From what I saw,” she said. “From what I heard. From what I knew.”

Tim grunted. And I realized it wasn’t because he wanted to save his words for more important things. It was because he didn’t know what words to say. He didn’t look angry. He looked old.

He settled for this: “Get out of my office. Both of you.”

-----

We have this tradition at the Chronicle, just like the building tour. On someone’s last day in the newsroom, we go out to lunch. Even if it does mean walking on eggshells to get there.

On Friday Dani led us all to the taco place. Her hair was pink now, her back-to-school shade, I guess. We walked in silence together past city hall. Past the Thai food truck—that was new—and the tired old tattoo parlor. Tim came along too, wearing a short-sleeve shirt with an ink-stained pocket that complemented the grease on his everyday tie. He had no choice but to join us. He always shares a few words of appreciation at goodbye lunches. 

Dani ordered a sweet potato hash burrito. For Pete, grilled watermelon salad. Dieter blinked in the midday brightness and ordered a Diet Coke with dessert donuts. “The nachos,” said Eliot. “Just cheese, no beans or any of this other stuff.” Gladys asked for what Dani’s having. For Tim, fish tacos. I knew that was coming. The one word on the menu he would have recognized was “fish.”

And then he cleared his throat. We all waited. He looked at his hands. 

“Dani, you work hard,” he said. He kept his eyes down. “And you are one royal pain in the ass.”

She smiled, and we all relaxed. “I thought reporters were supposed to be a royal pain in the ass,” she said.

“You are a royal pain in the ass to an especially high degree.” He lifted his gaze to hers and might have smiled too, if only for a moment and just at the corners of his mouth. It was enough.

“You’ve been great,” Dani said. “I love you all.” I glanced at Pete, whose dreams of loving her back were fading with every hour. A whole summer of salads and nothing to show for it.

Gladys made the goodbye card for Dani—the goodbye card, that’s another tradition—and it reached me before the food arrived. Gladys had drawn a sad-face emoji on the front, in the blue marker reserved for good work. Beneath it, handwritten words: “We’re going to miss you.”

I opened the card to add my name. “Thanks for the energy,” I wrote. “Come back and see us.” Then I handed it to Tim. He paused over it for the longest time. The waitress approached with the first of our plates. 

Finally Tim signed his name, just his name, clicked his pen and returned it to his shirt pocket. He closed the card and passed it along quickly, as if relieved to have it out of his hands, just like Dani. Confronted by a plate of fish tacos for the first time, he picked up his knife and fork. Me, I wondered who would make the goodbye card for Gladys. 

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