Page 34 of The Business Trip

Oh, man, I had forgotten all about that. But she was right. This could potentially bring in tons of advertising dollars, which paid our bills and my salary. Katrina’s monetary demands of me were getting bigger and bigger—the kids needed new clothes, new shoes, more lessons, yada yada, and I was feeling stretched very thin. Had even been holding off on some monogrammedshirts I’d been wanting to get. If this client came on board with all of their dollars, maybe I’d receive a bonus in my next check.

“Listen, Mary, if I take the day off, tell the newsroom I just extended my trip.”

“You don’t want them to know that you’re sick?” She sounded puzzled.

“Nah—people get weird about germs. Better just to say I stayed a bit longer.”

“OK, you’re the boss, but really, people don’t mind if someone takes a sick day.”

No weakness, Mary, no weakness. You give an inch, they take a mile. They smell blood in the water, they circle like sharks. One crack in the facade is sometimes all it takes.

“I haven’t taken a sick day in five years, and this isn’t going to be my first,” I said. “Tell the newsroom I’m on a plane today and I’ll be in tomorrow.”

Fatigue was calling me back to bed, and I wound up sleeping most of the day again. When I woke up in the afternoon, I checked emails—I had almost two thousand new ones since I had departed for San Diego. Life of a news manager. Sighing, I decided they could all wait for tomorrow, when I was officially on the clock.

An hour later, I felt like I could finally shower, shave, and put on clean clothes. I started to feel more myself, and my stomach growled. There were only three things in the fridge, though, so I used DoorDash to order a basic chicken-and-noodle dish from a place down the street and ate on the couch flipping between two NBA games. I fell asleep early and, thank God, woke up bright-eyed Tuesday, ready for work.

Driving to the station and parking my Range Rover in my favorite spot away from the rest of the cars—I couldn’t risk ascratch being with the proletariat—I bounded into the newsroom feeling strong and healthy.

“Good morning, Leslie, Zac, Warren, Terrell, Alice,” I bellowed as I went. When the news director walks into a room, everyone should know. People straightened up when they heard me; they stopped chatting and turned to their desks. It pleased me to see what kind of effect I could have just with a few words.

My office was a glass-walled space on the side of the newsroom that actually drove me a little batty. Sometimes a person needed privacy, and I was a fish in a bowl in there, couldn’t even scratch my balls without the newsroom seeing.

I flopped down into my extra wide ergonomic chair. It was a gift from our GM, Bill, for Christmas the year before and was the most comfortable goddamn thing ever. I was just firing up the computer when my assistant news director, Jorge, came in.

“Hey, how was San Diego?” he asked.

Jorge was a nice guy. Not news director material, in my opinion, but decent for an assistant. To be honest, he had been a diversity hire my GM had rammed down my throat. When the position was open, I had preferred a white guy from a smaller market, but was overruled in favor of getting more people of color into management.

“Great, man, stayed an extra day. How was everything here?”

“Good, really good. Got some stuff to catch you up on later.”

I nodded. By 8:45 a.m., I had picked the stories I wanted. I knew some stations did manager meetings before the regular newsroom meeting, but I always thought of that as a waste of time. One person would be making the decision in the end anyway—that would be me, the head honcho, the chief enchilada—so why prolong it by pretending to hear everyone’s ideas and opinions? Reporters just wanted to know what they wereassigned to and get out the door. Those long, lingering meetings of my past, when I wasn’t in charge, were painful to even think about. I ran things my way now, and it was the best way. People always told me I was very efficient, and I considered that a high compliment. Who didn’t love efficiency, especially in a newsroom?

At nine, we gathered in our conference room, me at the head of the table at the whiteboard. A quick look at the weather with our meteorologist, a run-through of overnight crime and court cases from our assignment desk, and I could start putting reporters into those stories. Lickety-split, done and done.

Anything else happening that day in the city would be what we called “pace”—short stories, like thirty seconds, shot by a photojournalist but not with a reporter. The producer would write it up and put it into their shows to make the pace of the show go faster.

My philosophy was so simple I couldn’t believe it wasn’t patented: Reporters go to crime and breaking news and court cases. We load the show with these and put the fluff at the end.

Another station in town was doing a whole bunch of issue crap, like politics and “meet the candidates” and “this referendum means blah-blah-blah” shit.Who cares?People wanted three things: crime, breaking news, and weather. Maybe a dog-rescue story thrown in every few months, but that’s it. I had everyone out the door on their stories before 9:15, and I could see how much my staff appreciated my decisiveness.

The meetings made my morning go fast. There was the web team meeting and the sports meeting, upcoming election planning, and a meeting about how many stories we could fairly do for Black History Month without shorting all of the other specialty months. So many goddamn ethnic and other months. But I just shut up and approved a robust plan.

I also had my weekly check-in with Bill. He was the only person in the building who could tell me what to do. As I sat down, he jumped right in:

“Welcome back, Trent. How was the conference? Did you learn anything worth sharing?”

“Not really,” I said, struggling to remember anything that was actually talked about. “Went to all of the sessions, but we do things pretty darn well around here. People should look tousfor ideas.”

“That’s good to know. What would you say was the most enlightening session you attended?” Bill pressed.

I tried to flash back to the program book, to remember the actual titles of the sessions. The only one that came to mind was mental health, the one I hadn’t attended. Could I BS my way through this? Of course I could. I was Trent McCarthy.

“Mental health, Bill. Such an important topic for any newsroom.”

“I agree, a critical topic, especially for our younger employees who seem to be more in touch with their feelings. And what did you learn?” Bill said, leaning forward in his ergonomic chair.

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