Tabloid City

Tabloid City

12:02 a.m. Sam Briscoe. City room of New York World, 100
West Street.
Here comes Briscoe, seventy-one
years old, five foot eleven,
182 pounds. He turns a corner into the city room of the
last afternoon newspaper in New York. He is the editor in chief.
His overcoat is arched across his left shoulder and he is carrying
his jacket. The cuffs of his shirtsleeves are crisply folded twice,
below the elbows. His necktie hangs loose, without a knot, making
two vertical dark red slashes inside the vertical bands of his
bright red suspenders. He moves swiftly, from long habit, as if
eluding ambush by reporters and editors who might approach
him for raises, days off, or loans. Or these days, for news about
buyouts and layoffs. His crew cut is steel gray, his lean furrowed
face tightly shaven. The dark pouches under both eyes show that
he has worked for many years at night. In the vast, almost empty
room, there are twenty-six
desks, four reporters, and three copy
editors, all occasionally glancing at four mounted television
screens tuned to New York 1 and CNN, Fox and MSNBC. A
fifth screen is dark. Briscoe doesn’t look at any of them. He goes
directly to a man named Matt Logan, seated at the news desk in
the center of the long wide room. Other desks butt against each
other, forming a kind of stockade. All are empty.
–We got the wood yet? Briscoe says.
Logan smiles and runs a hand through his thick white hair
and gazes past Briscoe at the desks. Briscoe thinks: We live in
the capital of emptiness. Logan is fifty-one
and in some way the
thick white hair makes him seem younger. Crowning the shaven
face, the ungullied skin.
–The kid’s still writing, Logan says, gesturing to his left.
Maybe you could remind him this is a daily.
Briscoe grunts at one of the oldest lines in the newspaper business.
Thinking: It’s still true. He sees the Fonseca kid squinting
at his computer screen, seeing nothing else, only the people he
has interviewed hours earlier, far from the city room. Briscoe
leans over Logan’s shoulder, glances up at the big green four-sided
copper clock hanging from the ceiling, a clock salvaged
from Pulitzer’s World. Thinking: Still plenty of time.
–What else do we have? he says, dropping coat and jacket over a
blank computer monitor. The early editions of the morning papers
are scattered on the desk, the Times, the Post, the News. Logan clicks
on a page that shows four possible versions of the wood. The page 1
headline. Briscoe thinks: I’m so old. He remembers seeing page 1 letters
actually cut from wood in the old composing room of the Post, six
blocks down West Street. The muffled sound of Linotype machines
hammering away from the composing room. Most of the operators
deaf-mutes, signaling to each other by hand.

Excerpted from the book Tabloid City by Pete Hamill. Copyright © 2011 by Deirdre Enterprises, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.