Never Look Away Read Online Free Page B

bid for Congress.
    "Yeah, well, that's the thing about politics," I said. "When one dick-head leaves the scene, half a dozen others rush in to fill the vacancy."
    "Even if you get the story," Jan said, "will they print it?"
    I looked out my window. I made a fist and tapped it lightly on my knee. "I don't know," I said.
    Things had changed at the Standard . It was still owned by the Russell family, and a Russell still sat in the publisher's chair, and there were various Russells scattered about the newsroom and other departments. But the family's commitment to keeping it a real newspaper had shifted in the last five years. The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who'd probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran "What Others Think," a sampling of editorials from across the country. We didn't think for ourselves more than three or four times a week.
    We no longer had our own movie critic. Theater reviews were farmed out to freelancers. The courts bureau had been shut down, and only the most newsworthy trials got covered, provided we happened to know they were on.
    But the most alarming indicator of our decline was sending reporting jobs offshore. I hadn't thought it was possible, but when the Russells heard about how a paper in Pasadena had pulled it off, they couldn't move quickly enough. They started with something as simple as entertainment listings. Why pay someone here fifteen to twenty bucks an hour to write up what's going on around town when you could email all the info to some guy in India who'd put the whole thing together for seven dollars an hour?
    When the Russells found how well that worked, they stepped it up.
    Various city committees had a live Internet video feed. Why send a reporter? Why even pay one to watch it from the office? Why not get some guy named Patel in Mumbai to watch it, write up what he sees, then email his story back to Promise Falls, New York?
    The paper was looking to save money any way it could. Advertising revenue was in freefall. The classified section had all but disappeared, losing out to online services like Craigslist. Many of the paper's clients were becoming more selective, banking on fewer but costlier radio and TV spots instead of full- or even half-page ads. So what if you hired reporters to cover local events who'd never even set foot in your community? If it saved money, go for it.
    While it wasn't surprising to find that kind of mentality among the paper's bean counters, it was pretty foreign in the newsroom. At least until now. As Brian Donnelly, the city editor and, more important, the publisher's nephew, had mentioned to me only the day before, "How hard can it be to write down what people say at a meeting? Are we going to do a better job of it just because we're sitting right there? Some of these guys in India, they take really good notes."
    "Don't you ever get tired of this?" Jan asked, hitting the intermittent wipers to clear off some light rain.
    "Yeah, sure, but I'm beating my head against the wall with Brian."
    "I'm not talking about work," Jan said. "I'm talking about your parents. I mean, we see them every day. Your parents are nice enough and all, but there's a limit. It's like we're being smothered or something."
    "Where's this coming from?"
    "You know we can never just drop Ethan off or pick him up at the end of the day. You have to go through the interrogation. 'How was your day?' 'What's new at work?' 'What are you having