Chapter Twenty-One #2
“It’s not supposed to be the whole fix by itself.
” I laid it out the way I’d have laid out any structural argument, three legs instead of one, because I’d learned, the hard way, that a single revenue source is exactly the kind of promise that gets quietly walked back the first time reality doesn’t cooperate with it.
“The subscription bump, even if half of it churns off in six months, is a real, recurring floor under the paper that didn’t exist before this month.
Malcolm’s contract, if the board approves it, is seventy-two thousand dollars over eighteen months, guaranteed, not contingent on how many people keep reading after the story cools.
And I’ve had the state press association’s executive director on the phone twice this week about a syndication arrangement — smaller papers around the state want to run our reporting on the transition, properly licensed, properly paid, and I’ve quoted them eight hundred dollars per piece.
It isn’t much on its own; I’ve got four other outlets already interested in the follow-up pieces I’m planning through inauguration. ”
“You’re planning follow-up pieces.”
“I’m a reporter with an actual byline now, Marisol. Of course I’m planning follow-up pieces.” I said it and heard, only after it was already out, how much I meant it as a fact about myself rather than a joke, and let it stand that way rather than softening it into one.
The state press association’s executive director, a clipped, efficient woman named on the call only as Director Ferro, had asked me exactly two questions before she’d agreed to terms: whether the Courier would insist on a correction clause if any licensee altered the copy without approval, and whether I’d be willing to do a twenty-minute call with the association’s smaller members about how a two-person newsroom had broken a statewide story ahead of outlets ten times its size.
“That second part isn’t in the contract,” she’d said.
“I’m asking as a favor, because half our membership is exactly your father’s paper, six years from where you found it, and I think they’d rather hear it from you than read about it in a trade newsletter.
” I’d said yes before she finished the sentence, because it cost me twenty minutes and it was, I recognized even as I agreed to it, the first time in this whole story that somebody had asked me for something and I hadn’t had to calculate what it would cost me first.
“None of these three things alone gets Walt off that retirement account,” I told Marisol.
“Together, conservatively, we’re looking at somewhere close to seven thousand dollars a month in new, real revenue, which is roughly what it costs to run this newsroom the way it’s supposed to be run, plus one more reporter. ”
“One more reporter.”
“I want to hire someone. Junior, cheap, hungry — somebody who wants exactly the kind of job you had five years ago before this place got too thin to give it to anyone. I don’t want you doing the work of two people forever just because you were too stubborn to say the job needed three.”
Marisol was quiet a long moment, turning her pen the way she turned everything when she was deciding how much to let a thing cost her to say out loud. “You built that whole plan without asking me first.”
“I built the numbers without asking you first. I’m not going to hire anyone, or sign anything, without you sitting in the room for it, because it’s your newsroom to run day to day, same as you told me on my first morning here, and I’m not going to be the person who forgets that just because I finally have a plan that works.
” I met her eyes, the same directness she’d taught me over a month of legal pads and cold coffee.
“Is that going to be enough? Not the money. The way I brought it to you.”
“It’s enough.” Something in her face eased, not all the way, but further than I’d seen it go since the day I’d walked in asking for a byline.
“You did this the way I’d have wanted you to do it, for what it’s worth.
Sourced. Checked twice. Not a single dollar of it charity, and not a single dollar of it your husband’s. ”
I put one more line in front of Walt that hadn’t been in the original plan, and told Marisol about it before I told him.
“Managing editor. On paper, with a raise attached, effective the day the hospital contract clears. You’ve been running this newsroom like the title already belonged to you for five years.
I’d like the masthead to finally agree.”
She was quiet long enough that I wondered if I’d overstepped. “I didn’t ask you for that.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s exactly why I’m doing it now, before you have a chance to talk yourself out of deserving it.
” I held her gaze the way she’d held mine on my first morning in this building.
“You held this place together with a folding chair and sheer stubbornness for five years before I ever walked back in here. I’m not going to let the paper get healthy again without your name catching up to the work you were already doing. ”
“Don’t make me cry at a desk I’ve never once cried at in five years.”
“Noted. I’ll wait until you’re standing.”
She laughed, short and real, and went back to her screen, and neither of us said anything else about it, because some gratitude is better left where it landed than turned into a whole speech about itself.
We ran the job posting the following Monday, four lines in our own classifieds, because Marisol said there was something fitting about hiring a reporter’s replacement in the exact section of the paper that had shrunk the most over five years of losses.
Twenty-two applications came in inside a week, a number that would have been unthinkable for a paper this size a month earlier, and the one we both circled without discussing it first was a twenty-four-year-old named Theo Winslow, two years out of the state university’s journalism program, currently underemployed writing SEO copy for a mattress company, whose cover letter said, in its entire second paragraph, that he’d read the ER piece three times and wanted to work somewhere that still believed a fact could move a bill.
Marisol scheduled him for an interview the following week, and told me, dry as ever, that she intended to make him do the debate-committee minutes for his first month before she trusted him with anything that mattered, the exact hazing she’d once half-joked about giving me.
We hired him on the spot, two days later, after he’d sat across from both of us at the darkroom table and answered exactly one question honestly instead of impressively: what would you have done differently, covering this story, if you’d had it instead of us.
He’d thought about it a full thirty seconds before admitting he didn’t know, that he suspected he’d have wanted to run it faster and worse, and that watching us not do that was most of why he wanted the job in the first place.
Marisol told him afterward that it was the only correct answer to that question she’d heard in eleven years of asking it, and hired him before he’d made it to his car.
Sadie asked about it at dinner that night, the way she’d started asking about the paper the way she used to ask only about the campaign, leaning forward over her plate instead of her phone. “So Grandpa’s not going to go broke anymore?”