Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 16

On the first day of his new job, Jack woke early and considered going for a run, but wasn't sure he had enough time. He's been in the little suite at the Essex house for a couple of days, and he really liked it, but he knew he'd have to find his own place soon. He would miss looking out the big window overlooking the Square. To the right, the city looked pretty much as he remembered it while to the left was the fenced-in construction area where building facades stood like tombstones.

He wasn't quite ready to post an update to Molly's story, but figured he'd just check to see if there were new comments. There was one.

"You will be punished," the comment began. "Your homosexual lifestyle is an abomination to God (Leviticus 18:22). Jesus said men and women are made for each other, not men with men and women with women (Matthew 19:4-5). I sincerely urge you to repent of your abhorrent sins and accept Jesus as your Lord and savior before it is too late."

Jack checked his watch; he had 20 minutes, and that would be enough because he was always prepared for something like this. He got out his college notebook where he'd taken notes on Biblical scriptures. This was going to be fun. It combined his two favorite things: naked girls and arguing with Christians.

He also felt something else. John had always thought it was wrong to harass or discriminate against people just because they were gay, but he didn't actually know any gay people (that he knew of), so it had just been an abstract idea. Now, they were picking on someone he cared about -- Molly -- and that made him angry. Fifteen minutes later, Molly posted her response.

Thank you for your expression of concern for my eternal soul, but I think you should be more worried about your own. I do not want to presume, because Jesus warned us against judging others (John 8:7, Matthew 7:1-5), but your words reveal a lot about you.

You are so eager to quote that one line from Leviticus, but have you read the rest of that book? It is filled with Old Testament condemnations against all kinds of things such as getting a tattoo, eating seafood, and dozens of other common things people do today. Do you follow all of these equally, or do you just quote that one line because it says what you already believe?

Your interpretation of Matthew is even more dishonest because anyone who reads the full passage would see that Jesus is not talking about homosexuality but divorce. On that topic, He makes His view quite clear, saying, "I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery." So in addition to expressing your "concern" to gay people, do you also tell divorced and remarried couples how sincerely concerned you are about their salvation?

Jesus was even more explicit in his condemnation of the rich, saying ‘I tell you it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God' (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25). Do you also contact people who are wealthy to tell them you are worried about their eternal souls?

You don't? Well, that is rather concerning because it strongly suggests you are a hypocrite, and Jesus speaks at some length about what He thinks about hypocrites (Mathew 23). So please accept my sincere expression of concern about your salvation. You really should be more careful about how you quote your Lord Jesus because ... I hear he has quite a temper.

With time to spare, Jack went down the rickety elevator and stepped out of the Essex into the morning sun. He had no need of his car to go to work that morning because the Morning Star was right across the Square. It was just one of several narrow shopfronts, but stood out because of its tall marble columns that made it look like a bank. He vaguely remembered it from childhood, but had never been inside. He now knew the story, though. Back around 1920, Amos Fox founded the Morning Star, but none of the local banks would give him a loan to renovate the dilapidated building and print shop. He put together the money from private lenders and then had the architect design the exterior to look like a bank.

In those days, the newspaper only occupied that one narrow strip of the block, but over the years it acquired all the neighboring buildings. The first-floor store fronts were still rented out to various shops, but the upper floors were all part of the Morning Star. Even now, as he approached, the newspaper's main entrance made it appear no bigger than any of the other small shops on either side -- though a large "Morning Star" sign was attached near the top of the five-story building, along with the digital time and temperature. He was right on time, and it was 67 degrees.

Jack pushed through the brass revolving door and saw that the marble interior looked like a bank as well. He was met by a cheery woman from Human Resources who took him on a tour of the building. H.R. was on the 5th floor, and they went there first to finalize his paperwork. Then she took him down to the 4th floor, which was Advertising and the 3rd floor, Circulation. Both floors were a sea of desks where busy employees attended to the business aspects of running a newspaper operation.

As a business reporter, Jack was well-versed in the financial mechanics of the newspaper industry. He knew that display advertising and classifieds accounted for 75% of a newspaper's revenue, with home delivery and street sale circulation making up the rest. Although local television stations and direct mail advertising posed some competition, most city newspapers dominated their markets and typically operated with a 35% profit margin.

Though he was peripherally interested in the business operations of newspapers, Jack knew that the heart of any paper was its newsroom, and he was glad when his tour guide finally brought him to that floor. Like the others, it was a vast room filled with desks and people on telephones or working at their computers. But it was less tidy than the other floors, with precarious stacks of newspapers here and there and smoke drifting to the stained ceiling tiles from cigarettes and cigars. Newsrooms were notorious fire traps, but the joke was that it would be a convenient story to cover.

The nice HR lady led Jack towards the only interior walls in the newsroom -- the glass cube office of Max Fleming, who pumped his hand and led him again through the newsroom to be introduced to whatever reporters, editors or copy boys happened to pass them by. Periodically, as they turned a corner or went down a long row of desks, the floor would briefly slant down or up. Sometimes there were a couple of steps, and Jack guessed these marked where buildings on the block had been joined and the adjacent walls removed.

Max led him to the business desk, where he was joining the team. More introductions followed, and Jack was opening the drawers of his new desk when it was time for the 11 a.m. news meeting. Normally, Jack wouldn't have to go to this meeting because it was just the desk editors or their assistants, along with the photo and graphics editors. Max presided, again introducing Jack, and then each section editor went through the stories his or her department had going for the next day's paper and which of those stories might be contenders for page one. The chief photo editor and page designer passed around printouts of the main artistic elements for the major stories. It was a bigger version of news meetings he'd been part of back at The Chronicle.

Although most of the newsroom was a modern-day open space of desks, the meeting room was in the original part of the building and was lined with wooden bookshelves like an old college library. Everyone referred to it as "the General's library," and he knew from his reading that this referred to Amos Fox, who had been a general in WWI before launching his newspaper publishing career. At the end of the long room was a locked door leading to Fox's office, which was no longer used and had been left unchanged from the day he died.

A couple of his new teammates on the business desk took him out for lunch, and then the last item on his first-day orientation was the Morning Star Library. Back at The Herald, they'd had a standard newspaper "morgue" -- a few rows of clipping files, an unabridged dictionary on its own wooden stand, the Encyclopedia Britannica and a globe. There was one librarian, a white-haired lady named Harriet, who cut the stories out of the paper, taped the jumps together and filed the article under its topic, like "City Council" or "Traffic Accidents." That system worked well enough, especially during the day when Harriet herself was on duty to help find things. In the evenings, reporters were on their own trying to guess the librarian's methodology. She was, for example, a stickler for grammar, and so stories about the "Meals on Wheels" program were filed under "Wheels, Meals on."

When he walked into the Morning Star Library, Jack was astonished to see more than a dozen people at work (which turned out to be only half the actual staff). Most of them were women, but there were a few guys -- including Phil, who met him at the door. He was exactly what Jack would have imagined in a male librarian -- gray-bearded, wearing a sweater vest over a button-down shirt and tie. He even had an unlit pipe that he carried around and absently tapped against his teeth now and then as he gave Jack a tour of the library.

It was impressive. They were all electronic now, archiving news stories in a database that could be searched by any word in the story. Even the newly shot photos were being archived digitally -- along with the entire set of shots the photographer took at the assignment. It was like negative files, but on a computer.

"That must take an enormous amount of storage space," Jack said.

"Sure does," Phil replied. "That's why we save them onto magneto-optical disks." Phil opened a few drawers to show the plastic cases.

"But we've only been electronic for about a year," Phil said, "so our pre-electronic archives are still heavily used." Leading Jack down a long bank of filing cabinets, Phil stopped at an aisle where the cabinet drawers were only five or six inches deep instead of the usual file size. He pulled out a random drawer to show a bank of small envelopes, each color-coded in one corner to denote the year. Some were envelopes containing a folded article, and others were cross-reference cards leading to an envelope. On the front of both the cards and envelopes was a concise abstract of the story with key names and topics underlined. Each card or envelope was topped by a hierarchical subject term such as "Public Schools -- Students -- Discipline -- Suspensions" or "Crime -- Homicides -- Shootings -- Statistics."

"These cabinets hold about eight or nine years of the index," Phil was explaining, "so before we went electronic, as we would run out of room, we'd pull the oldest years based on the color coding and microfilm that section of the index. Each card or envelope is marked with the date, page, and column where the article appeared, and you use that to look up the article on the regular microfilm of the paper itself."

Phil led him to one of the computers and showed Jack how he would be able to log into the library from his own computer at his desk in the business department. "This is our landing page," he said, clicking open a screen that listed several resources, including the library's book catalog, some informational CDs that could be accessed remotely, an archive of PDFs of recent newspaper front pages, and something labeled StarFiles.

"This is where the library staff compiles information on topics and people that the newspaper covers on a regular basis. So, for example, if there is a plane crash, you could click here to see a chronology of previous area aviation accidents. Or if it's a police action shooting, you could click here for a similar timeline. And here we have bios of public officials and other folks who are in the news."

Jack watched, impressed by the depth of information and how images were displayed with the text, taking advantage of browser capabilities. "So, it's like you're maintaining your own electronic encyclopedia. This is really impressive."

"Yeah, it's something our library director started when we were on ATEX, but it was just text then. Now we can really design the pages and link from one page to another. It's only internal at the moment, but they're planning on making it available to the public."

"I assumed you were the director," Jack said, standing up. He realized he was out of time and had to get to the afternoon news meeting.

"No, I just supervise the day-side reference team," Phil said. "The director intended to be here to give you the tour herself, but she got pulled into a meeting. Actually, here she comes now."

Jack turned his head to follow Phil's glance, and as he did so, he caught a glimpse of red hair. Whenever this happened, a portion of his brain always hoped it would be Millie, but Jack knew from long experience that it never was.

Until now.

"Johnny!" Millie cried, throwing her arms around him.