“I don’t know.”
“Gerry, make it my swan song. Who doesn’t love those? What drama, what pathos, hardly a dry eye in the house. My retirement present. Look at the money you’ll save not buying me that gold Rolex.”
The editor tapped his pen on a Post-it. Fitz said nothing. He stared at his boss the way he gazed at reluctant interviewees. Ask a question and look at ’em until they squirm and talk. A technique as old as journalism itself.
Finally: “I can’t pay mileage. And the photographer’s with the governor all day.”
Which, to Fitz, was as good as his saying “Go get the story. I’m behind you a hundred percent.”
4
Swan song . . .
National Media Group had looked at bottom lines, as companies named National Media Group will do, and decided that the print edition of the Examiner had to go—dwindling circulation and ad revenues, high overhead.
The noble newspaper was shutting down in less than a month—this, the paper that had not only reported in depth about local matters and New York State politics, but had had its own reporters covering D-Day, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Nixon’s resignation, the Iranian hostages, the Iraq War, the elections of Obama and of Trump.
Soon to be no more.
And with the paper and ink edition gone, all original hard news reporting would end too. Of the paper’s two full-time reporters, one would be going to online and Fitz would be retiring.
The ExaminerOnline would still run news but—as Bradford had just mentioned—only from the national feeds and in limited amounts. Most of the website’s stories would be what National Media was known for: OOMC, vocalized as “Oomec.” It stood for “Original Online Media Content”: bastard quasi-journalistic/quasi-entertainment web stories and blogs and, for listeners, podcasts and internet radio talk shows (like reality TV, obscenely cheap, wildly popular and extremely profitable).
To Fitz, OOMC articles were mostly time wasters, junk food. Oh, some blogs and podcasts featured solid investigative reporting, but to read or listen to them steadily, you’d think the world was populated with stabbed spouses, missing children and wrongfully convicted felons whom the bloggers were on hell-bent missions to free.
Most OOMC run by ExaminerOnline and its sister outlets was about influencers (whatever they were), TV personalities, actors, famous chefs, stand-up comics, outlandish artists, fashion designers, athletes, musicians, the rich . . . basically any manner of celebrity, provided they were hugely popular or sexy or had either spoken up for a good cause (LGBTQ and animals were winners) or misbehaved in a tasty, but misdemeanorly way.
OOMCs . . . Christ . . .
So, retirement.
Maybe he’d write his memoir. Maybe teach. Maybe fish.
He stared at the scanner again, waiting for any juicy reports from the front.
Nothing. Radio silence.
With some effort, breathing hard, he bent over and dug for his dusty digital camera in his bottom desk drawer—in his more than three decades working for the paper, he’d never had to take his own cuts. He found the small Nikon behind a sloshing Jack Daniel’s bottle. The battery was dead. He plugged in the charger cable.
The scanner spoke. A special agent with the FBI’s VCTF—Violent Crimes Task Force—would soon be setting up a mobile command center near the kidnapping site. After this tease, it fell silent.
He stared at the camera. The battery indicator remained bar-less. His phone’s camera? No, not enough resolution. Should just buy a new camera on the way. But they weren’t cheap . . .
“I asked. We can’t do it.” A woman’s voice startled him.
He glanced at his doorway.
Kelley Wyandotte—she went by the anachronistic “Dottie”—was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, less than half Fitz’s age. She was a staffer with ExaminerOnline. Her business card described her as a “Senior Content Editor,” and her job was to spawn OOMC. If anyone could tell him what an influencer was, it’d be she. He had no desire to ask.
Fitz was concentrating on the camera, willing it to charge. And on the police scanner, willing it to speak. In response to her comment he muttered, “Ridiculous.”
He wanted to say, “Bullshit,” but that would be like dressing down somebody else’s child. Just didn’t feel right. Fitz hardly knew her. Like the editor in chief, Dottie was new to the organization; she’d come from Manhattan.
Her complexion ghostly, Dottie had short spiky brunette hair, wore black tights and, it seemed, three tank tops. Her ears sported a half dozen rings and her tats were quite well done, notably the butterfly on her neck and a scorpion on her forearm. Four studs pierced her left cheek, perhaps in the shape of some constellation. He’d tried to imagine her at a White House press briefing.
One bar on the camera battery. Charge. Please charge.
“You asked?” he queried.
“I just said I did.”
There was asking and then there was asking.
Their dispute: Until the print edition shut down, the ExaminerOnline published the same stories as in the traditional paper. But two of his pieces had been buried in the back of the online site. One was about the county’s new domestic abuse shelter; people needed to see the piece, and the online edition went to many more readers than the print. His stories were also infested with links to sites only tangentially connected to the shelter piece and served no purpose, Fitz could see, except to generate revenue.
Angry, he’d complained to Dottie. She’d explained, astonishingly, that algorithms decided which stories would run and where. “News aggregators do it all the time,” she’d added, as if perplexed he didn’t know that. “Look at your inbox for the news feeds you subscribe to. Why do you think you get some stories and not others? Why are some at the top, others at the bottom?”
His feed was called a newspaper, the inbox was his front doorstep and he got every damn word that was fit to print.
She now added, “Placing a story manually would damage the optimal targeted impact model.”
That pushed him over the limit. “Bull . . . shit.”
“Say what you like, you saw Gerry’s memo? Readership is up twenty-seven percent since the merger.”
Lions don’t merge with gazelles.
Fitz was going to argue, or complain, or just be snarky—she’d met his “bullshit” with a steely glare—but by now the camera battery registered two intrepid bars. Good enough. He unplugged the device and pocketed it, along with two notebooks.
Anyway, why bother to battle? In a few weeks, he’d be gone.
Happily retired.
Writing memoirs, teaching, fishing.
Those days couldn’t come fast enough.
5
She was a stocky woman in a navy-blue pantsuit and a white blouse buttoned to the neck. Practical flats, like the shoes that Jen wore every day of her adult life. Dark. Always dark.
Fitz watched the woman through the open side door of the forty-foot mobile command center, FBI and VCTF printed on the white sides in dark-blue ink.
With dry blonde hair, cut shoulder-length and sprayed insistently into place, she was on her feet, bending over a desk in the middle of the MCC. She held two phones. One she was speaking into via hands-free, the other bore a text she was reading. Simultaneously she was studying a map, probably of downtown Garner. Fitz snapped a few pictures.