“Shocker,” Dan said. She glanced at him as he took another drag of his cigarette. He was old, but it seemed like he still cared about how he looked—he made sure that he didn’t come to work in the same plaid shirt twice in a week and he wore tortoiseshell glasses that gave his clean-shaven roundish face a more distinguished air—and even though he wasn’t exactly her type (also, he was her boss), she could see how he would have been considered handsome at one point.
He also had strong feelings about the right way to do journalism. He had taught Katya that you should never, ever hold your best stuff, especially anything big or remotely time-sensitive. She operated under the assumption that if she had had an idea or gotten a story or talked to someone important, then someone else had had the same idea, gotten the same story, or talked to the same person. It was a lesson she’d learned quickly, a couple months into the job, when she had proudly relayed to Dan that she was going to be able to break the news that the founder of Calendr had been forced out. She’d gotten the information from her NYU classmate Tom, the founder’s assistant, who had also reported that his boss was currently holed up inside his office and refusing to come out, which was made all the more awkward by the fact that his office was glass and in the middle of the room. But Katya had been slow to actually write the story; there were some details—what was he wearing? how had he been given the news?—that she was waiting to hear back from Tom about, and in the meantime, BizWorld published a post, and Dan had told her she was lucky he hadn’t mentioned anything to Rich or Deanna about the scoop because they would have flipped out that BizWorld had beaten them. She was determined never to let that happen again.
So even though the Connectiv people had assured her that she was the only reporter they’d let into the building since they’d moved in two weeks ago—according to their head of corporate communications, “The Times was begging us for the story, but we decided to give it to you,” which Katya neither totally believed nor disbelieved—she was still worried she’d get scooped if she waited too long.
“I mean, God forbid some idiot who works there tweets a picture of their new office. Good-bye, scoop! I love Twitter but, man, it really has ruined journalism.” This was a familiar rant of Dan’s, right up there with how young reporters today didn’t know how to pick up a phone and instead got all their information online, how pointless journalism school was, and how many résumés he got each week from people his age who had finally figured out that print was dead and they should jump on this newfangled internet train. He liked to print these résumés out and theatrically rip them in half. He considered it a therapeutic waste of paper.
Katya secretly enjoyed listening to him talk like this; it made her feel like he was putting her in the category of “Not Completely Idiotic Young Person.” She also didn’t know anyone who worked in print or read anything in print beyond posting a copy of the Sunday Times or an image of an actual hardcover book on Instagram so that everyone knew how intellectual they were. She barely knew anyone who even read anything on a desktop outside of work. If it wasn’t on your phone, it might as well not exist.
“Used to be, all you had to worry about was another site beating you by a few minutes on a story. Now, someone can ruin your scoop without your even having a story up. It’s complete madness.” Katya nodded as Dan continued. “That’s why you see so many half-baked stories out there. People who don’t have the whole story, just worried about getting scooped, putting some shell post up there and filling in the blanks later so they can say they were first. It’s ridiculous.”
Her phone vibrated and she glanced down at it. A Venmo notification that Janelle had paid her for the electric bill, which she’d annotated with several lightbulb emoji.
They took another few puffs in silence. “Actually,” he said, and he seemed to be weighing his words carefully. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Okay.” Hadn’t they already been talking? She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with her boot.
Dan looked toward the door of the building as though to make sure no one was listening. He dropped his voice. “Rich and Deanna are going to do an audit.”
“What kind of audit?” Katya asked.
“They’re going to go through everyone’s stories and score them—not based just on traffic, but also on how deeply people read them and their impact. So, like, how long did people spend reading your story, how many times did it get mentioned on Twitter, did it get talked about in other publications, did you go on TV to discuss it…that kind of stuff.”
Katya felt an unfamiliar sensation in her head—not panic, exactly, but unease. “But this whole time they were telling us that traffic was the thing that really mattered.” As she said this, she realized her voice was almost squeaking. Embarrassing.
“Well, yes.” He was practically whispering now. “They’ve always said that traffic was the most important thing, but they also have always said they cared about who was reading and how they were reading. Now they’re just going to actually quantify it.”
Katya gave him a sidelong glance. “But what are they actually going to do?”
Dan sighed. “I don’t know; Deanna apparently read some study that said that the only real way to motivate people and get them to do their best work is to always make them a little bit afraid of losing their jobs. Not too afraid, but a little bit afraid.”
“Wait. Are people going to lose their jobs?”
“No.” Dan took one last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out. “I mean, not right away. At least, that’s what they say. But they also said something about how it’s good practice to always be getting rid of your bottom twenty-five percent of people.”