Gossip rat

Part 1

In a faraway time, and a faraway place, Jo lands her dream job. Or her father’s dream job. One of the two. Potentially both, who knows.

What an achievement.

She’s fresh out of J-school -- completed on her home turf, and, interestingly, exactly where her father studied -- and is the youngest and least experienced trainee in a cohort of groomed-to-be star reporters parachuted across the world to work at the region’s largest and oldest broadsheet, The Post Twilight Post Truth Post, where, it was known that occasionally, respectable journalism was done. 

She’s also kind of broke, living on an embarrassing trainee-salary in gangster-riddled windowless-subdivided hell whose only comfort came in the rare appearance of Mr. Whiskers, a slightly shy rat who’d hang out in the bins outside a front door whose window had been shattered when loan sharks came one night to intimidate Jo’s neighbour, a pregnant, pint sized filipina with pink hair and a spider tattoo on her neck who once taught her to break into her own room when Jo locked herself out.  

NO RUN-ON SENTENCES!!!! (ED) REWRITE.

The opportunity of a lifetime, and an enviable career start which promised speedy career progression -- if cards were played right and front page scoops gathered. The move precipitated a clash with her father and a whirlwind of family drama that led to an eight year rift. The absolute optimal conditions for what was to come.

What do you, my kind reader, need to know about The Post Truth Post Twilight Post? Well, first things first, it’s definitely fictional and not based on anything real at all, I promise you that. 

It’s also a colonial legacy and a geopolitical clusterfuck which, like most of the sad newsy-papery-things trying to survive the 21st Century, gets passed around by various enigmatic proprietors hoping they might get more out of it than debt and a barrage of bitchy comment pieces and muckraking by rival, equally broke and beleaguered publications.

In Jo’s time there, its owners had officially given up on pretending to care about this storied and intensely-gossiped-about establishment, and were desperate to sell.

Like trying to flog a fancy estate by covering up rot with stucco veneers, ambitious and seasoned reporters were brought in from across the globe with the promise that they’d actually get to do really good work out of one of the only corners of the region that supposedly still enjoyed free press. For now.

In the spirit of the Digital-Media-is-our-Messiah times, that included the impressive hire of the couple responsible for the Daily Fail’s explosive online success -- including its infamous Sidebar of Shame -- a feat both felt a tad guilty about and an experience from which both were still healing.

Were these star-studded journos able to do all the fancy things they were promised they could do? Hmmm.

Well, may I remind you, kind reader, that the proprietors were looking to sell, and not especially indiscriminately. I.e. there were prospective buyers they might not have wanted to alienate. May I also explain to you the particular nature of geopolitical fuckism meets a clash of gargantuan reporter egos and the impact these forces have on the ability of anyone to get anything sensible done against a backdrop of influence no one could ever really figure out. 

What is one of the key differences between a British editor and an American one, for example? Well, as one almost-permanently wasted but brilliant British colleague found it, if you call your American boss a ‘cunt’ -- even if it’s precipitated by the word ‘good’ -- you will get fired.

But then, you’ll get reinstated once that ‘good cunt’ is replaced by another colleague -- let’s call him ‘ambivalent cunt’ -- who hails from a big sooty place local reporters would most probably refer to as Mordor if they ever had time to read Lord of The Rings, which they absolutely did not, given that they were up-to-their eyeballs examining the intricate political and legal stuff to do with the city’s changing relationship to a domineering and all-seeing eyeball perched on a volcanic hill that screamed constantly into the digital void about auspicious plenums, economic miracles and a century all for itself.  

THIS METAPHOR MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE: (ED). REWORK.
 
Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. That’s a word a lot of grumpy, whiskey-guzzling old print journalists hear often in meetings with the flashy, bushy-tailed youngsters who they are convinced know absolutely nothing about ‘real’ journalism. And by ‘real’ journalism, what they mean is the tradition of a pompous Anglosaxon man coming in to put his name above work mostly gathered by local reporters. Now that was a tradition Jo’s father had vehemently and litigiously pushed back against in his career-breaking day covering turbulence, war, and the crumbling of an empire from his home turf for the British press when Jo was just a baby. So, she was sensitive to some of the frustrations directed at her and parachuted-in-peers from her local colleagues, and maybe, even, sometimes, their willing punch bag.

Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Clicks, clicks, clicks. One of the main things these crusty old journalists have to learn about when someone explains what a ‘digital revolution’ means to them, is that there’s just a lot more competition to worry about -- a lot more voices screaming into void, with -- like the rest of us, varying personal agendas and yearnings for attention, power, and maybe, even, a spot of redemption.

REALLY? REDEMPTION? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THING THIS IS; MOBY DICK? PRETENTIOUS TWAT.

One of them, it turned out, was the gossip blog of a very strange and kind of awkward and lizardy British guy a couple of years older than Jo.  He had a real penchant for performative, attention-grabbing gestures in various self-righteous poses that worked well for his power-antagonizing brand.

These included, but were not limited to, the gesture of sending Christmas cards with naked pictures of himself to a selection of female reporters at his self-anointed rival, The Post Truth Post Twilight Post, where he was disliked and dismissed by all.  Except for the few friends of the reporter fired for getting the paper into some libel stuff who he had briefly dated and for whom he’d revamped his blog into an online news portal she could steer along with him and take aim at the place that most unceremonious bumped her from her illustrious trainee-reporter-on-the-rise slot. 

See what I mean about raging egos? And we haven’t got into what happens when forces like these meet the crazy-making fumes of political unrest meets 21st century reporting/ void screaming. There’s no word that quite encapsulates what all of that coming together feels like. But there is the following sound:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

ED: WHAT THE FUCK?  

 Anyway, she dumped him for a better job. Colleagues still get to be regaled with intricate details of their sex life. 

Jo first met him once when she was flat hunting and he had a room up for let. She’d been conditioned by her mentor to dislike him, but was also curious and open minded enough to want to figure him out for herself. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, and talked at her constantly. 

‘Does the Post have a dartboard with my face on it?’ he asked at one point. ‘Nope,’ she replied. She didn’t move in.

It would only be a couple of years on, having left the Post under, well, very uncomfortable and opaque conditions that brought about stress-related illness for which she was briefly hospitalized -- when enough career resentment had built that the idea of working for an outlet with increasing bite, and, admittedly, a lot more relevance, started to look really kind of sparkly. Lord-of-the-rings ring kinda sparkly.

 A mutual friend had recommended her as his right hand man, and, when the community found out that she’d accepted, the headline was: What a good hire. This time round, when they met, her impression of him had changed. There was still that discomfort: He was still fascinatingly uncomfortable in his own skin and self-important in his statements, but there was also this sadness and weariness about him, like he was only starting to realise how his insane drive to be televised in this attention-grabbing fist-shaking stance, had impacted to his capacity to lead a normal life, connect about normal things, have a perspective in which the front page didn’t always read: Someone is coming for me, and it’s because I’m important. 

Did this reflection come from Lizard man himself, or was it therapeutic work of Jo? She can’t remember. What she does remember is that taking on that job, in the service of her ego, was one of the biggest and most important mistakes of her life.