The elevator doors parted. As he was about to step through, a voice down the hallway called, “Joe Emery. I need to talk to you.”
It was Martha Jean Hutcherson, the Examiner’s assistant director of human relations. They called her The Scythe. There could be only one reason she’d sought him out.
A chill swept him. He walked over to her. “Sarantos promised me I’d be the last reporter to go,” he said, struggling to keep hurt and anger out of his voice. “How could this happen? I do a great job for you, for peanuts.”
She nodded. “I know. Corporate told us to find another $200,000 right away. Angela said that the only way she could reach that number was to eliminate your job and two sales jobs in advertising. I tried to talk her out of it because I think she’s making a mistake.”
She led him down the hallway into a small conference room. Seated at the table were her boss, Mack Clay, the HR director, infamous for his false affability; and the publisher, Angela Brun, a tall, thin blonde, younger than Emery.
“We meet again,” Emery said, determined not to show his rage.
“Sad to say, we do,” Brun said. She would not meet his eye.
The gist of what followed:
He was informed that this time, unlike before, there would be no alternative job for him. He would receive two week’s severance pay for every year of service to the Examiner, 15 in his case, just under $33,000; this sum, Emery noted, was calculated upon his current reduced salary, not the higher salary he’d pulled down before. The money would be available two weeks after his separation day, which, Clay said, “is today.”
He was reminded that, including his earlier stint at the Akron Enquirer, he had 20 years’ service vested in the Schmittlapp Media defined benefit pension system; he could begin collecting payments any time before he turned 65, at which point collection became mandatory. He was also eligible for up to 26 weeks of unemployment compensation, collectible right away. As well, the company health insurance for himself and his dependents would be available for up to 18 months, as long as he paid the group premium himself. (He offered up a silent thankful prayer that his kid, Jay Three, was on his stepfather’s health plan.)
He should turn in his rental car no later than noon Saturday. Security would now escort him to his desk, which he should clean out, after which he would turn in his building keycard and company ID card and depart the premises. For good.
Time to push back. “You know, one other place you could economize is HR itself,” Emery told Brun. “Do you really need two HR professionals to oversee your reduced staff?”
Brun appeared to be thinking about this. “Time to go, Joe,” Clay hissed.
“Not just yet. I want to keep my laptop. My home computer is a piece of crap. You won’t be needing the laptop. You have dozens not in use already.”
“You can’t keep it,” Clay said. “It’s company property.”
Emery shrugged. “Well I guess I'll just have to talk to my lawyer, that pit bull Tom Bernier, about an age-discrimination lawsuit. I'm 55, as you know.”
“You can’t win a lawsuit,” Clay said, smirking. “We've structured the layoffs to avoid such problems.”
“I know,” Emery said. “But think of the negative publicity in a town with lots of pissed off middle-age subscribers who've lost their jobs or are worried about losing their jobs. It’s not as though I'm demanding that you replace my car, which I lost on company business, although, on second thought ...”
“Take the laptop,” Brun blurted. “Just get IT to take off the proprietary software before you leave tonight. Mack will write this concession into your separation agreement. We'll notify you when it’s ready for review and signature, probably next week.”
Exhilarated, Emery stood up, said, “Guys, it’s been a slice,” and strode out of the room. Outside stood two younger women, nicely coiffed and dressed, whom he recognized as the advertising sales victims. He could not remember their names. One was crying. The exhilaration evaporated. Shaking with rage and humiliation, he gave them a grim smile.
Behind them was Fred Wilkerson, the Examiner’s only remaining staff security guard and a long-time friend. He smiled sadly at Emery and led him toward the newsroom, saying, “Ain’t this a bitch? Gonna miss your friendly face, Joe.”
The two dozen or so staffers in the newsroom regarded Emery as though he were a swine flu carrier. Sarantos, ashen-faced, met them at Emery’s desk. “Fred, I need a minute with Joe, if you don’t mind.” Wilkerson nodded and ambled off a few yards.
“Jesus, Joe, can you believe these bastards? I had no idea this was coming or I’d have warned you. Just two days ago, Bud promised me you’d be the last reporter to go; there’s no one left who can reliably report the tough stories.”
“Did Bud sign off on this?” Bud Tomlinson was the editor of the newspaper.
“Hell, no, he didn’t. They told him you’d be going only a half-hour ago. Brun advised Bud, like she always does, to ‘manage through the crisis to keep up the quality of the daily report.’ Can you believe that bullshit? How the hell can we do that if we don’t have anyone who can do the work? God, I hate this stinking business. If I didn’t have an autistic kid I’d quit.”
Emery’s guts were churning. “I gotta get out of here, Pete.”
Emery sat on his balcony sipping bourbon until the sun disappeared below the north bank of the Kiowa and the evening air turned damp. Inside, he lit the gas fixture in his fireplace, making a mental note that he must indulge less frequently in such extravagances. Then he remembered he had no car and exclaimed, “Oh-shit.” The insurance payoff from the Eclipse would cover part of the cost of a replacement. But getting something reliable would require thousands more. You couldn’t live in Wichita without a car, even if you had no job to commute to. He lived within walking distance of a grocery store, but most other basic services were miles away.
He'd been thinking he'd be OK on money. Not so. He was screwed.
He went to his bar cart to pour another drink. Then he pushed the bottle away. He’d been down this path before. It led nowhere good. Then, deciding he was already there, he seized the bottle and topped up his glass.
Chapter 10: Entrepreneur
October 26, 8:30 a.m.
The worst things about getting laid off were having no place to go on workday mornings and nothing significant to do while lolling around at home. A consummate professional who’s been stripped of his identity, Emery often reflected, finds little comfort in reading the books backed up on his nightstand or refining meatless gourmet recipes in his condo’s micro-kitchen. Nor did long walks on neighborhood sidewalks and along the parts of the riverbank not still submerged from the surge quell the sense of worthlessness eroding his self-confidence.
Nowhere in the country could Emery find, on the Internet job boards, a newspaper job that would be sufficiently secure to justify the expense of moving. The industry as he’d known it was dying. The market for his skill set was gone. But he found no comfort in knowing that thousands of other consummate American journalists shared his plight. The loss of his gig at the Examiner felt like a personal failure.
Then, six mornings after Emery’s Examiner ouster, Carol, sick of his increasingly lackluster manner during their frequent phone conversations, put together a to-do list, at the top of which was finding the right car, and e-mailed it to him. Item two was creating a budget that matched his reduced economic circumstances, including savings and investment set-asides for his future, and memorializing it in a spreadsheet. Third was “finding meaningful work.”
At about 10 that morning, she called to see how far along he was in executing the list.
He was nursing a hangover. “Well, I haven’t done anything just yet.”
“I suspected as much, so I took the liberty of starting on Item One: finding you a car.”
“But …”
“Got your laptop up?”
She led him to Cars.com, thence to a black low-miles 1999 four-door Pontiac Grand Prix with
the V-6 engine and a supercharger. “There’s your car,” she declared. “It’s right there in Wichita, private owner, and you can probably get it for less than she’s asking. The blower gives you added power when you need it, but the six-banger gives you reasonable gas mileage.”
He told her he had this thing for Japanese roadsters and had been thinking about a Honda Prelude, maybe, or another Eclipse.
But she would have none of it. “I watched in horror as your car got knocked into the river because it wasn’t powerful enough to outrun that Ford, remember? You need something with muscle.”
“But I’m not in the newspaper business anymore,” he protested. “No one has the incentive to hurt me now.”
“You mean you’re giving up on your career? And the story?”
“My career giving up on me is more like it. There are no jobs for me anywhere. And I have no way to stay on the story. How do I get around those obstacles?” His head was pounding.
“Damn it, Joe. Figure it out.” A pause. “I sound like I’m trying to take over your life, don’t I? I'm sorry. Maybe I don’t know you well enough to speak that frankly to you.”
He sighed. “No, you do, Carol. It’s OK. I appreciate your help. I’ll think about everything you said, I promise.”
Now, a little over a week later, here he was, clean shaven, wearing his blue serge suit, seated across a downtown restaurant table from Arthur Cushing and working on Item Three. The Grand Prix was parked at the curb. The spreadsheet memorializing his revised financial plan was stored in the laptop.
Cushing had called the day before to invite him to breakfast. The former managing editor of the Examiner, Cushing had resigned at the turn of the 21st century to set up one of Wichita’s first web-based businesses, ArtsList.com. The site was a classified ad service free for all buyers and sellers except corporate employers, car dealers, “adult services” providers and apartment complex owners. These folks paid transaction fees much lower than the classified fees the Examiner charged.
Emery had heard that over the years, ArtsList.com had eroded the newspaper’s classified ad revenue by more than half. The site was especially popular with the under-35 crowd.
More recently, Cushing had branched out into other web ventures, including Spotlight Wichita, a web-based reporting and analysis service. “But we’re having trouble keeping that one in the black, quite frankly,” he told Emery.
“How come? The Examiner’s in a death spiral. The local news vacuum grows bigger with each new reduction in force. Not to brag, but my departure leaves them with virtually no one capable of covering public affairs in depth.”
Cushing nodded. “Their business model is collapsing. I saw that coming a decade a ago and got out. Our problem is that there’s not, as yet, a reliable business model for web-only news organizations. How we get paid is still a big issue.”
“Resolution around the corner?”
Cushing, a portly man in starched blue button-down shirt and khakis, nodded as he chewed a forkful of omelet. “Not-for-profit could be part of the answer. Another part is scrapping traditional employment models.”
“So you beg for money like public broadcasting while making your staff to work for a pittance.”
Cushing grinned. “I always liked you, Emery, because of your talent for cutting through weasel words. That’s a wonderful quality in a reporter. I can’t tell you how envious I was of the Examiner for having someone capable of reporting that awful dam-terrorism story out west. Why can’t we get someone like that? I asked myself after you pulled the scab off the FBI’s preposterous ‘act of God’ explanation.”
“Now here I am, freshly unemployed. Is that why you wanted to meet with me today?”
“Yes, to offer you a business proposition.”
“As opposed to a job.”
“If you want a job, Emery, go out to Doo Dah Marine. They’re looking for a boat salesman. Their ad went up on ArtsList yesterday. Salary plus commissions plus benefits – not much but probably enough for you to live on.”
“OK, OK. I get what you’re saying. What’s your proposal?”
“You start a public affairs blog, independently. We do that instead of contracting with you for Spotlight because you're strong enough to carry a blog. The best blogs are personality-driven.
“We link it to the Spotlight homepage, along with your picture. As part of our contract with you, we promote the hell out of it on the social media and our growing e-mail list. We've gotten good at that. We also cut you in on our liability insurance, at your expense, to fend off any defamation problems and help you get set up as a limited liability corporation. That insulates your personal funds from any court judgments against you. You, meanwhile, cross link to the Spotlight homepage on your blog’s homepage.”
Intrigued, Emery said, “I think I get it. You drive traffic to my venture and I drive traffic to yours. But how do I – we – get paid?”
Cushing shrugged. “We don’t, unless your blog is good enough fast enough to attract and hold an audience. If you can pull that off and rack up page views and dwell time, you’ll get some ad revenue from Google. And we’ll supplant that by selling local web ads on your site as well as our own. In return, you sign a contract giving us 30 percent of any revenues you earn over the next three years, after which we see where we are and renegotiate.”
“Too high. Twenty percent.”
Cushing laughed. “You’re priceless, Emery, you really are. Here you are, out of a job and trying to beat me down on a concept. I’m doing you a favor.”
“We wouldn’t be talking if you didn’t think I could help Spotlight Wichita. I would bring a brand, albeit a small one, to the enterprise. My name stands for integrity, doggedness and journalistic skill. Some Examiner readers are sure to follow me to my web site as well as yours.”
Serious now, Cushing said, “All right. We’ll say 25 percent with renegotiation to take place at the end of the first contract year.”
“What about content?”
“Up to you. Ideally, you’ll have a combination of substance and snark. In this new world, it’s OK ethically to have an attitude, even an agenda, as long as you’re honest and clear about what it is. But your blog will go nowhere unless you feed it at least four times a week, ideally more. You’ll have to work your butt off. And you'll have to learn to interact with your readers.”
“What name did you have in mind for it?”
A shrug. “That’s your problem. It does need to be edgy and memorable, which means something more original than ‘Joe Emery’s Blog.’ You’ll also need design help. Most templates that the blog services offer are lame. We gave several designers under contract, but if you use one of them, you’ll have to pay her. Or him. We can’t have you looking like an employee.”
The men fell into silence as they finished their meals. As Cushing snatched the check away from Emery, he said, “Any questions?”
“When can I start?”
“Don’t you want to think it over?”
“No. You've offered me my only viable chance of staying in journalism in Kansas. I appreciate it. I’ll do it. If it doesn’t work I’ll at least have tried.”
Delighted, Cushing said, “Follow me over to my loft and we’ll draw up the contract.”
Back home a little before noon, Emery called Carol. She was at work but had a minute to talk. “I’ve knocked out Item Three,” he told her. He outlined his deal with Cushing.
“Good for you, Joe. I think this is a risk worth taking. You can stay on the story. You can go after the bastards who framed Ted. And you'll be your own publisher. No one can lay you off.”
“That’s a big part of the attraction.”
“As far as design help is concerned, why don’t you come out here for a few days? Sadie will be home from Fort Hays State on Thursday afternoon. She’s a web design whiz. She can whip up something on her Mac. While we’re waiting for her, maybe you could work on content ideas. You could stay with us. We have plenty of room.”
<
br /> “What about Internet? I need to get this thing launched fast.”
“What, you think 21st century services die out west of Wichita? We’re a bunch of webheads out here in Ouimet. The entire town is under a WiMax cloud, part of the town leaders' quest, in tandem with Kan-Tel, to keep at least some of our young people here and attract clean industry. We have to offer them something besides careers in agriculture and oil and gas. Launch your blog from here. There’s no better place. It’s actually an interesting story how this happened. Maybe you can cover that on your blog.”
He had no idea what WiMax was, but her pitch sounded good. Maybe there was a story in it.
Regardless, he was eager to see her again, and not only because she had become a good friend and trusted adviser. After their ad hoc ordeal in Los Llanos, he’d feared that she would lose interest in him. But she had stuck with him through his identity-loss crisis and inspired him to find a way to reboot his professional life. She was tough, beautiful and more than a match for him on brain power. Now she was inviting him into her house. The thought of what might happen under her roof made his pulse quicken.
“How soon can I come?” he asked.
“Drive out right away. I'll alert Mom to set another place for dinner.”
Chapter 11: The Vindicator
October 28, 8 p.m.
“Why do you want to call it that?” Sadie Clark demanded. She was a slender young woman with her mother’s dark hair, plump lips, soft facial features and assertive personality. She’d arrived home from the university at dinnertime.
“Wichita’s second-to-last daily newspaper was The Vindicator,” Emery said. “It folded in the early 1980s. For the eighty-some years it lasted, The Vindicator was a scrappy locally owned rag that tried to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Old maxim describing what a newspaper’s supposed to do. No playing it safe like corporate newspapers do now.”
Vindicator Page 5