“Oh,” Katya said. “The leaderboard, right.” The leaderboard was new, a screen on the wall in the middle of the newsroom that showed a constantly updating stream of everyone’s traffic and impact score. For a few seconds it would show where everyone ranked in total traffic and impact for the month. Then it would flash to the totals for the week, then for the day. When Deanna unveiled it that morning, she’d said that it wasn’t meant to be threatening or scary, but motivating. “Healthy competition, people!” she said, and Katya glanced up and noticed she was in fifth place for the week, which stung. She was used to being at or near the top, but now, under this new system, her impact score was lower than she would have liked. She had spent so much time over the past few months learning how to get a lot of traffic; she hadn’t necessarily been trying to get mentioned on other sites or influential Twitter feeds, although that was always a bonus. She usually operated under the assumption that quantity tended to beget not only quality, but also traffic. The more you wrote, the more you figured out what people liked to read, and then you could just write more of that, and presumably each post would be better than the last one. And there was definitely a point where, if your posts got really shitty, people stopped reading. The secret was learning how to churn out posts that were just good enough quality-wise, and do a lot of them. But under this new system, that wasn’t working as well.
Every so often she’d see a reporter complaining on Twitter about how far the quality of journalism had tumbled, thanks to the internet, and that journalists with real skills and experience who knew how to write original stories were getting shoved aside in favor of young people who leeched off the hard work of these allegedly hardworking journalists, and it was all because their greedy overlords were obsessed with clicks and traffic—again, at the expense of “real” journalists. Aggregation had become a dirty word, and the people who suffered were the readers, who were now faced with piles of online news dreck, according to this line of thinking, and every story was the same, and no one checked sources, and eventually everyone was just going to die under a pile of clickbait, which was the dirtiest word of all. TechScene was regularly accused of publishing clickbait, and what Katya didn’t understand was why everyone seemed so upset about stories that people actually wanted to read. Was the success of quality journalism in the old days measured by how few people read your work? Katya felt like the people doing the most complaining were the ones who didn’t have jobs, so they had time on their hands, or who couldn’t keep up with the way that the world was changing, so they felt like they had to cling to how things used to be. Whatever the case, she would be fine with never hearing from them again.
“I don’t know,” Katya said. “I’m not really concerned about the leaderboard. I think I’m in third place, or something?” She said this knowing full well that she was in fifth.
Dan put his drink down on the bar—a little too forcefully, Katya thought. “Actually,” he said, “you’re in fifth. And, to be honest…I’m a little concerned.”
“You are?” Dan had never told her he was even remotely concerned about the quality of her work or how much she was producing. In fact, he was usually making fun of her for taking work too seriously.
“I just…” He took another sip of his drink. “I just don’t want Deanna and Rich to start…noticing.”
“What would they have to notice? I’m fifth, not last.”
“I know,” Dan said. “But you’ve been on a downward trajectory, not an upward one.”
“Ouch,” Katya said. “Wow. Tell me how you really feel.”
“Oh come on.” He punched her lightly on the arm. “You know I’m telling you this for your own good. I’m not taking Christina out for drinks to tell her she needs to step it up.”
Fair point, Katya thought. “Why are they doing this?”
“Well, you can never really know what Rich and Deanna are thinking, but from what they’ve said to me, they feel like we should be competing with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, not just, like, Mashable. And to do that we need to be writing bigger stories. So they really only want to keep people on staff who can write those kinds of stories.”
“So they’re going to fire people?” Katya asked. “Like, a lot of people?” TakeOff was her first real job; everywhere else she’d ever worked—the jewelry store owned by her mom’s friend, a short-lived stint as a hostess at an Applebee’s in downtown Brooklyn—she’d seen people get fired, but the idea of mass layoffs was new and somewhat terrifying.
Dan shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. But the numbers I’ve heard them toss around are around one-third of the staff.”
One-third! How would they be able to publish anything if they fired a third of the staff?
“Fuck,” she said. She took a big swig of her vodka soda and realized she hadn’t eaten since lunch, when she’d had a Kind bar and a bag of Baked Barbecue Lay’s at her desk. She should pace herself.
“Yeah.” He stared straight ahead and took a final sip of his drink, then beckoned the bartender over. “Another round, please.”
“Whoa,” Katya said. “I said one drink.”
“I know. But you seem to be taking this news hard.”
“I’m just a little surprised, is all.”
Dan smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen you surprised. Katya Pasternack is usually the calmest, the coolest, the most collected. You’re a tough nut to crack.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. You’re Russian. You’re tough, you know? You don’t take anyone’s shit.”
“Well…thanks, I guess.” She took another sip of her first vodka soda as the bartender brought another.
“It’s a compliment. Anyway…I just want you to know that whatever happens, I’m on your side. So if you need help deciphering what Deanna and Rich mean or whatever, you just ask me, okay?”
“Thanks. Sure. Okay, I will. Thanks.”
“I know you’re the best reporter in the newsroom, full stop. I just want to make sure that everyone else knows that too.” He paused. “I especially want to make sure you know that.”
Maybe it was the vodka soda, maybe it was Dan’s little speech, maybe it was this unfamiliar, unwelcome feeling of anxiety—but suddenly, she wanted to confide in him.
“So…remember when I met your wife?”
“Ha, yes, I do. Why?”
“Something happened at that party that I haven’t told you about that I actually think could be a big story.” She took a sip of the second vodka soda. “A really big story.”
“Yeah?” Dan said.
“It’s about Mack McAllister.” She watched as Dan’s eyes grew wide. “I’ll give you the abridged version, but basically…”
When she had finished telling him the whole story, he sat in silence for a minute, sipping his drink. “Okay. Okay. This is big. This is huge. This is…wow. I mean, I can’t believe you waited this long to tell me, but fuck, Katya, we have to move on this! Tomorrow, you call Mack and you try to get him to say something, anything, about it or about—what’s her name again?”
“Isabel. Isabel Taylor.”