Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  Jake wasn’t typing.

  Mahoney paused. “Are you going to say something about this in your column?”

  It’s none of your business what I’m going to say. “Look, Mr. Mahoney, I don’t know what’s going to be in it.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ve got a stack of research here, Mr. Woods. Other states spend much less per student each year, and yet have much higher test scores than we do. Washington, DC, spends the highest amount of money per student in the country, and is exactly number 51 in test scores, the absolute worst. I’ve got a study here of the 170 public schools identified as the best in America, and their expenditures are way under the national average. It’s an established fact there’s no direct correlation between money spent and quality of education. Yet we’re always told if we would only spend more money, everything would be okay. But it just isn’t true. I’d be glad to send you this information, Mr. Woods. The statistics are straight from official agencies. They’re not biased.”

  “Sorry, I just don’t have the time to wade through a stack of papers from either side. I get the drift. Anything else?”

  Jake had lost interest. He busily wrote and edited his story while Mahoney droned on. Finally he interrupted him.

  “Okay, I’ve already given you more time than I gave Ms. Betcher. Any last shot you want to take?”

  “Well, I don’t have any shots I want to take at all. What I’ve said hasn’t been shots, it’s been honest opinions. I would say thanks to the many teachers who are doing such a great job, and I’d suggest to the schools they be open-minded and consider the advantages of instilling traditional values in kids, and getting back to the basics in the classrooms.”

  Jake typed a few more lines. “Okay, Mr. Mahoney. Thanks for your time.”

  “I’d be interested in your perspective on this issue, Mr. Woods.”

  “Read tomorrow’s column and you’ll get it. Thanks again.” Jake hung up quickly. He didn’t mean to be rude, but he was under deadline. Mahoney had used up too much of his time already.

  It was 11:17 now, and the adrenaline was really flowing. He had to get this off by 11:35, 11:45 at the latest. At least he wasn’t waiting for return calls today. He thought it should be a law, at least on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, that all important people stay by their phones—and off them—from 9:30 to 11:30 A.M.

  After typing furiously, he pushed the word count key to check length. Good. He was at six hundred words already. He typed eight more sentences and got to seven hundred. It was time to call Barbara back.

  “Jake Woods again. Barbara’s expecting me.” Ms. Betcher was on the line in five seconds. “Barbara, just wrapping it up. Talked to Carl Mahoney. Yeah, he’s a real peach. Listen, I need your responses to a few of his statements. Okay, here’s the first one—‘public education isn’t competitive with private education.’”

  “That’s ridiculous. We provide the finest education possible with our limited funding. Private schools are patronized by the wealthy. They close their doors to the poor, racial minorities, and handicapped children. They only let in privileged children, so at the end of the year they can say, ‘See, our test scores are higher than public schools.’ Our teachers are trained and certified. Theirs are glorified Sunday school teachers. Not competitive? In their dreams. Ridiculous.”

  So, Barbara, do you have any opinion on this. “Of course, I don’t know that I’d want it said like that in print. But you hear what I’m saying, don’t you Jake?”

  “I do. Okay, here’s another one,” Jake said, searching the screen and finding the partial sentence “pay taxes, have right to say how they’re spent in schools.”

  “Mahoney says, ‘My tax money goes to the schools, so it’s my right to control how that money is spent.’”

  “The arrogance of these people! Who do they think they are? This isn’t a company and he’s not a stockholder. What about the silent majority who think we’re doing a good job, and support us, or at least just leave us alone? They don’t tell us how to run our schools. We’ve done some homework on this yahoo. Did you know Mahoney doesn’t even send his kids to public school?”

  “Yeah, I caught him on that.”

  “So what right does he have to tell us how to run a school system he’s abandoned?”

  “Hey, don’t get mad at me, Barbara. I’m just asking the questions.”

  “I know. I’m not mad at you, Jake. These Bible-thumping fundamentalists just make my skin crawl. If they got their way, it would destroy education. Anything else you want me to respond to?”

  “Nope, out of time. Thanks for standing by, Barbara. Good to talk with you.”

  “You got the fax, right?”

  “Yeah, it was a big help. Thanks.”

  “Jake,” Barbara sounded like a real pal now, “we’re looking forward to you speaking at our conference in March. The NEA really appreciates the pro-child, pro-education stance of the Trib, and your column in particular. Keep up the good work. We’ll all be looking for this column. Tomorrow’s paper, right?”

  “Right, assuming I finish it in the next ten minutes.” 11:45 was like the empty sign on a gas gauge, but he wouldn’t panic even then. You could squeeze out more miles by running on the fumes, and he could squeeze out more minutes, even if Winston grumped at him. Winston’s cute when he’s crabby, anyway.

  Jake attacked the article, paragraph by paragraph. Now he had nine hundred words, and a hundred had to go. He heard the gun for the final lap and geared up for his finish-line kick.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jake finished his column at 11:51, flirting as usual with his deadline. He pressed the send button, releasing it to Winston. His screen showed Winston was editing Martin’s column. Jake sighed relief Martin hadn’t been late. If Winston didn’t have one of their columns by 11:35, he was on the prowl like a cougar, stalking his prey. Sometimes Jake hit the dump button when he saw the testy editor coming, or heard his growl, so he could say “I sent it to you,” only to retrieve it and make a few more changes before Winston could work his way back to his office, sloughing off inquiries from the two-sided row of reporters.

  Sometimes Jake waved his arms frantically and caught someone’s attention, someone who understood the signal meant “stall Winston.” Bart, the television critic, twenty feet away and facing Jake’s work area, perpetually looked up at the three mini-TV screens bolted to the top rim of his cubicle. It was he, more often than not, whose attention Jake caught, and who pounced on Winston with some inane question, buying Jake the extra minute or two he needed. Such favors were commonly granted at the Trib. You never knew when you might need to call in your chips.

  As he watched his screen, Winston exited Martin’s column and sent it on to copyediting, next stop before layout and design. The terminal told Jake when Winston retrieved his column. Too late for touchups. He was supposed to stay by his desk for another fifteen minutes, in case Winston needed a conference, which he rarely did. Now it was kick back time. Jake was good for nothing the first few hours after a column. Coming to deadline with a job well done was as great a cause for celebration as coming empty-handed was cause for disgrace and regret. Usually the kick back began by taking the time to look at what others had written. Often he’d call up Martin’s column and give it the once over, hoping it was mediocre at best. But not today. He’d read it as hard copy tomorrow.

  The Tribune’s bevy of columnists wasn’t the close knit fraternity some newspaper groupies imagined. They rarely spent time together, perhaps believing they had more to lose than to gain by fraternizing and giving away ideas to those who seemed more like competitors than teammates. Columnists were an elite and privileged group. But he’d seen older columnists lose their touch, get replaced by the young bucks. The young ones genuinely admired them just as rookie pitchers admire the veteran hurler, but that admiration didn’t stop them from bumping the veteran off the team if younger arms could do what his no longer could. Sometimes Jake felt the hot breath of younger reporters chasing after
him, like hounds at his heels, turning phrases just so, in the hope that the Trib or some other newspaper would be so impressed they’d be offered the coveted role of columnist. It was an amazing thing, Jake thought, getting paid for doing what old men relish doing for free at lunch counters—giving an opinion on everything, solving the world’s problems every day.

  Jake highlighted one of the options on his screen and tapped into Clarence Abernathy’s sports column. The notation showed it had been finished and to the editor by 11:30. Smart man, Clarence, since Hugh, the sports editor, had been an all-American linebacker. Clarence was Jake’s favorite reading at the Trib—the only columnist Jake read word for word, every column. In the midst of some journalistic wannabes, Clarence brought a precision, clarity, and energy to his writing that Jake admired.

  Twice a week Jake and Clarence’s columns coincided, so they were in synchronous kickback modes together. Just a few weeks ago Jake distracted Pete Harman while Clarence commandeered Pete’s keyboard and saved, under a different name, the article he’d been sweating over. Then he cleared the screen, making it look like Pete’s entire morning’s work had disappeared. He and Jake watched Pete’s contortions from forty feet, while Clarence took a few pictures with fast film and a telephoto lens. After letting him try to figure out how he was going to explain it to his editor, the two fessed up. Thirty minutes later Clarence came back from the darkroom, and he and Jake presented Pete with an eight-by-ten blow up of the most mournful panicked look Pete’s face had ever known.

  Clarence was ten years younger than Jake and right where Jake had been at the same age, an ex-jock gym rat sports columnist with a loyal following. Jake knew if Clarence wanted to leave sports he’d make a top notch general columnist, and he’d told him so. In this case, Jake would welcome the competition. He and Clarence would sharpen each other if they ran head to head. Jake read the last paragraph of Clarence’s column, smiling and saying under his breath, “You nailed him, Clarence. Another winner. Good job.”

  Jake heard the noon whistle from the old city hall five blocks away. One hour till lunch with Ollie. Time to set up some appointments. He knew both numbers by heart—Mary Ann at Doc’s office number, Sue at Finney’s home number. As he listened to the ring on Mary Ann’s end, he wondered how long it would be before he forgot his friend’s telephone numbers.

  The calls went quickly. Fifty minutes to kill. Jake got up from his desk and headed to the staircase. Only one floor was above him, administration. It was the least familiar floor to Jake. He vaguely pictured lawyers strategizing, accountants calculating, and, most importantly, somebody issuing paychecks. But the heart of the floor was the huge plush office of Raylan Berkely, which he was familiar with. Like a star pupil shown off by the principal, Jake was called up there a couple of times a year, usually for a pat on the back, or to meet some VIP hobnobbing with Berkely or some prestigious editor the Trib was trying to woo from Chicago or Los Angeles.

  But today Jake was going down. He descended one floor to advertising and circulation. The floor was busy, but less hectic or noisy than the newsroom, brighter and more cheery. Seeing all the people reminded him that of 1,400 Trib employees, only 350 were reporters, a few more counting stringers, part-time writers who worked from home. The Trib received three thousand phone calls a day, requiring a full staff just to answer, talk, summarize, and forward complaints and concerns about the paper’s content, appearance, and delivery.

  The Trib wouldn’t happen without all these people in circulation, selling the paper, working with the supermarkets and convenience stores, recruiting delivery people, talking on the phone with potential subscribers. As Jake walked by one employee’s desk, she assured an unhappy subscriber that the paperboy would be instructed to stop throwing the Trib in her swimming pool.

  All that work, then we put the whole shootin’ match in the hands of a twelve-year-old kid!

  Advertising, into which Jake now strolled, was even more aesthetically pleasing. Interior design people had put in some time here and it showed. They’d never darkened the door of the newsroom, that was certain. But advertising had to deal with the high rollers, the big accounts whose advertising made the Tribune possible. Cheap as it was, a hundred pages of newsprint and all the labor that went into it wasn’t paid for with a few coins from the buyers, not by a long shot. The best reporting in the world would never see the light of day without someone’s tireless efforts selling ads.

  Jake sneaked up on Maggie, his friend in advertising layout and design, pulling gently on her long auburn hair.

  “Hi, Mag.”

  “Hey, Jake.” She checked her watch. “Column finished, huh? Making your rounds?”

  “Somebody’s got to check up on you people down here.” Jake pointed at the ad design on her computer screen. “You look like you’re working hard, Mag. Grateful Dead coming to town?”

  Stifled snickers surfaced from a few designers within ear shot.

  “Let it drop, will you Jake? Look, it’s been what, ten years?” Maggie smiled despite herself. Jake knew she enjoyed the ribbing. She’d drawn up a terrific ad for a Grateful Dead concert. She intended to place it in the Arts and Entertainment section, but somehow jotted down the wrong code and it ended up elsewhere—right in the middle of the obituaries.

  Jake winked at Maggie and continued his rambling tour of the newspaper he loved. The tension between news and advertising had reached a fever pitch more than once. News always complained their “news hole” was shrinking smaller and smaller, gobbled up by advertising. In reality, there was a constant ratio of news to ads. That meant the more ads were sold, the larger the newspaper and therefore the larger the news hole. Most reporters could never grasp this, for some reason.

  Every day editors learned how many total columns of print they’d been given to fill—national, state, city, sports, and so on. It didn’t matter what stories were brewing. Each section had to fill its quota, no more, no less. That could mean cutting news items if not much advertising had been sold, or scurrying to get copy by calling up stringers or ransacking the wire services if too much advertising had been sold. It didn’t matter how much or how little news happened today. The size of the paper was all determined by advertising sales.

  Wandering aimlessly, poking his nose around this corner and that, he thought the irony of all this was most evident near Christmas and in the summer. Around Christmas, the flow of news slows considerably because lots of news sources—including government and education—go dormant. But advertising swells, forcing editors to scrounge for news, printing features and news items they’d never consider other times of the year. In summer, advertising slows and papers get thinner, meaning lots of good summer stories never go to print. Some advertising people resented the fact no ads were permitted in the first three pages. Some reporters resented ads intermixed with news anywhere. To Jake, it was a symbiotic union he’d never lost sleep over. He was a liberal, but not a socialist. He pondered the irony of journalists and their fashionable anti-capitalist bent, never seeming to grasp that their socialist ideas could have no audience apart from the consumption-oriented capitalism which bought them the very space to air their anti-market sentiments.

  Now he headed for the staircase and walked down to the press room. He felt a note of sadness as he passed the floor that for decades housed the composing room, once a fixture at the Trib and every major newspaper. He had fond memories of the “dog houses,” the rows and rows of double sided A-frame slats where dozens of cursing old men taped full pages of cut-and-paste printouts of text and pictures, putting them together, stripping on design lines and corrections and color separations before they were burned on to the metal plates. Some papers still used the old composing rooms, others were still in phase out, using them partially. The Trib, as of a year ago, had ended the phase out, and the last generation of newspaper composers got their pink slips. He thought nostalgically of Chester, the old makeup editor, who tweaked things by hand at the last moment, typing up and pasting on
credit lines and corrections, not as straight as the always-perfect computer, but with the human touch.

  The magic of pagination had changed everything. It eliminated the in-between steps, allowing newsroom computers to do layout and design, sending the finished product directly to where negatives were burned on to the steel plates, which were finally fixed on to the massive printing presses.

  As he walked onto the huge open warehouse style floor, the unmistakable smell of newsprint hit him, that incomparable ambiance of paper and ink. With every step his feet felt the sticky tug of ink, settled from the air. It was quiet now, unearthly quiet, accentuated by the stark contrast to what it had been nine hours earlier and would soon be again. In a few hours the mammoth presses would be rolling, thundering at deafening levels, while men wearing earplugs yelled and signaled at each other. Jake often thought the press room was the perfect place for the hearing impaired, already so proficient with sign language.

  In the center, a soundproof room was the one refuge from the noise, the eye of the hurricane, where instructions and conversations could take place. A few technicians stood in there now, discussing machinery problems. To Jake’s right were a hundred rolls of newsprint, massive eighteen-hundred-pound rolls of paper, each seven miles long, yet so delicate that a single stone in a freight car could ruin an entire roll. Far too heavy to be moved by hand, the rolls traveled to the printers on conveyer belts. Five years ago a paper mill strike forced the Trib to run a half-size paper and under print the circulation. The paper buyer now bought rolls from six different suppliers in different parts of the region, insuring their eggs were no longer in one basket. It was unthinkable, unimaginable that the Trib would not be there on people’s porches, in their boxes, featured on the newsstands, lying in the machines where hurried people plopped their coins.