“Less than a week ago,” Cassie said.
“Right. We toyed with our motto being ‘Moving at the Speed of the Internet.’ But that seemed too old-school. You know, having a motto. At all. We’re a nimble, kinetic, rapidly transforming media landscape, right? RazorWire has now been in talks to move to the forefront of native content production in the new media landscape. Do you know what native content is?”
Cassie said she knew what “native” meant, and she did understand how the new media culture currently defined the word content—but, no, she didn’t know what native content was, exactly.
“Native content is the current best shot journalism has of surviving in a sustainable financial model. Companies and advertisers will approach us with the desire for us to create native content for a specific product or campaign, or for their company or industry in specific. Our editorial department then creates, crafts, hones that content, and we package it on the site alongside trad content. It is designated as such, with some small but clearly identifiable design element to make sure the reader can distinguish between traditional story content, and native content.” Cassie sat there looking at him. “Here, let me literally explain with an example. Literally, say HBO is putting out a show about bluegrass music.”
“HBO is putting out a show about bluegrass music.”
“What?”
“You said to literally say it.”
He just looked at her. “Hah, okay,” he said.
“I’m literally a bluegrass fiddler myself,” Cassie said, trying to right the ship. She found herself at once skeptical and more interested than she’d been since they started talking, which seemed evidence of a certain benefit of the service itself.
“I know,” Mario said. “It was on your resumé under ‘other skills.’ That’s literally—that’s why I used it as a example.” Cassie felt heat come to her cheeks, her throat constricting, and was brought back to herself only by his use of the article “a” when he should’ve said “an.” “So we might send a music reporter to do a piece on the bluegrass scene in Lower Manhattan, or a profile of the Station Inn in Nashville, or the Cantab Lounge in Boston, or a long profile of Chris Thile if he’s attached to the project and how could he not be these days, he’s such a rock star.”
Cassie said that he was a long way from a rock star, given that he didn’t play rock music.
“Bluegrass star,” Mario said. “You know what I mean.”
Cassie said she did.
“But that’s it. That’s the future. It’s the future of where things are headed, and we want to know if you want to be a part of the future.”
“Well, who wouldn’t want to be a part of the future,” Cassie said, while thinking, Unless I was actually to die of the cold in this office right now, I’m more or less certain I will have no choice but to be part of the future. “But honestly, isn’t what you’re describing just an advertorial? They always made advertorials in the past. Advertorial. Worst compound word ever?” She looked at Mario, who now just looked back at her. “But there you have it.”
“The advertorial is a thing of the past,” Mario said. “Very much an old-media concept. Our goal is to test out all kinds of new-media concepts to see if we can monetize them—and of course to use them to support the trad journalism and reporting we’ll always continue to do. We’ll do, say, this native content and use it to pay for arts coverage. We have a division that we haven’t branded yet that will develop a kind of hybrid of political satire and reportage which appears as if it could gain serious traction on social media as we approach each upcoming election.” Cassie asked him for an example of what he meant, if only to see if he’d again try for bluegrass. “Well, say, for example, Kanye ended up running for Senate—we might try to see if stories about his relationship with Kim, or about his childhood in Chicago, might gain traction, though they weren’t true. We could let our readers come up with the concepts and then have our trad op-ed reporters write the pieces.”
“So in this case what you’re describing is crowd-sourced propaganda?”
Mario paused. “I’m not sure that’s quite what we’d call it, but I like the way you think, Cassieblack. Moving straight to branding. I guess maybe … Open-source speculative journalism? Oh. That’s actually kind of good.” Though there was that pad of pink Post-its in front of him, Mario took out his iPhone and typed it in. “I could share credit for it with you if you joined us. When.” Cassie held her face still, trying to keep her jaw from slamming against her chest. “Okay, fine, I’d give you all the credit. You drive tough deals. I’m liking you more by the minute.”
For the first time since he began talking, he sat back in his chair. On his forearms, long red streaks had burrowed into his skin from his desktop, running lengthwise against the orange freckles up and down his arms. As inconspicuously as he could, Mario rubbed the tips of the fingers of his opposite hands along the painful-looking grooves. “But the main thing is that as you join us you need to stop thinking in terms of trad media and start thinking new media. The trad stuff was fine back whenever, in the Clinton Era or whatev—sorry, what-ev-er—but we’re obvi moving in a new direction, new revenue streams, the places where journo and content and editorial will all be heading.”
“And you want me to fact-check it,” Cassie said.
“Join us as our director of research. That’s right. I guess that part of it is trad, after all—a traditional research department. Like, our own snopes.org. Or factcheck.org, only without the dot org. Bringing a kind of retro feel to the way we do cutting-edge journalism. RazorWire thinks one of the best ways to solidify the native content model will be for us to be able to offer to partners that the work we do for them will undergo the same strict kind of overly meticulous, disproportionately funded scrutiny editorial always did in traditional media. So. Yes. You’d come in to head up an initiative to start a robust research department.”
“Fact-check advertorials, and down the road, gussied-up propaganda.”
“Come on with the title of director of the Research Department for RazorWire’s new Native Content Division.”
Cassie sat back in her own chair now. The way he stated and inflected it, it was entirely unclear if that last sentence was an interrogative or an imprecation. There was nothing in need of rubbing on her own forearms, and Mario wasn’t going to lean forward again himself—he had to maintain some sense of self-preservation even while having his crack at interviewing someone in the big office with the big repurposed wood desk—and the two of them were suddenly sitting very far from each other. “You’ve come very highly recommended. I can honestly tell you without your having to walk out of here that folks want you in.”
Cassie didn’t say anything. An image flashed in her head again of the thousands of liberal arts school senior English majors who would view an offer like the one being presented to her as the goal. She was not savvy in these situations and honestly didn’t want to be, but before she left her home in Ohio the summer before graduation, her father had given her one piece of business advice she had taken, and which helped: always leave as much dead space in conversation in a job interview as possible. Leave pauses, allow the interviewer to play his hand. “If you wait,” Dad said, “just count to ten, or sing the chorus of a song you like in your head, you’ll get two benefits: you won’t say something untoward or overenthusiastic yourself, and you’ll force the person opposite you to tell you what they want, even if they don’t want to.” Which is what happened now in a way that made her father look like a sage.
“Oh, and I’m sure you’ll want to know what the compensation package looks like.” Now Mario reached for the neon-pink Post-its on the desk. He pulled a Uni-Ball Vision from his pocket. He put the thin pad down on the desk and wrote something, and Cassie could see the Post-its bend and crinkle as he attempted to write. He picked it up, brought it very close to his face and looked at it, squinted a little, and handed it to Cassie. She couldn’t tell what the last five numbers said, but there were si
x digits in the number, which made the salary at a minimum three times what she’d ever in her life earned in a year. It might have added up to more than she’d made, total, in her twenty-seven years on the planet. It was enough to consider overseeing crowd-sourced propaganda.
“Well, I will be very happy to take the night to think about it,” Cassie said. She did not need the night to think about it—you’d have to be in possession of a trust fund or an M.D. or far more scrupulous scruples than Cassie possessed not to take a job in that office with that bocce court and that salary, whatever it was—but this was part of her father’s advice, and she was decent at following rules when she needed to be. She stood and left the office and headed out to the broiling summer midmorning after having left it with Mario that he would message her with the offer package.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
OUT ON MOTT STREET the heat was no longer an issue. She was so frigidly recalibrated from the forty minutes she’d spent in the glass office within the RazorWire office within the building within SoHo within Manhattan that it seemed she might never perspire again. In addition to the elation she carried out of the office, she carried a realigned core temperature.
She swiped her phone and went to make a call to Natalia to tell her the news, to get a reality check on whether this was possibly a good thing, and if there was any reason for her not to take the job. When she unlocked her phone she saw a text had already come through from Mario. He had AirDropped the offer package onto her phone before she left the building, which was not a thing she knew how to do herself. She couldn’t help but feel impressed by his technological acuity—no matter how great a Luddite a person was, Cassie had observed in her not quite thirty years on the planet, they couldn’t help but be awed in the face of true technological aptitude. It was like seeing a staggering wave on an ocean beach: its enormity could only be comprehended when witnessed in person. She opened the file and the number she saw there was fifty grand a year more than she thought she’d been offered. The differential between offers itself, even after taxes, would have been the most she’d ever made in a year. While she didn’t understand anything about vesting or what vesting was, short of being the word investing without the prefix in, it appeared she could also stand to make a large, large amount of money if she continued to work for RazorWire for more than a year.
Now she was ready to talk to Natalia, but before she could tap her finger on the green phone icon again—she had not taken a step further from the entrance to RazorWire, had stopped in her tracks as if the only thing that could exist in the phenomenological present was whatever information was brought to her on her phone—she heard someone say, “Cassie. Cassie Black.” She looked up to see a face that was familiar, but which between the disorientation of leaving the building and the dislocation of stepping into the summer heat from the arctic air and looking up from her phone and trying to have any emotional understanding whatsoever of what it would mean to be a twenty-seven-year-old liberal arts school alumna working at an Internet content development company making six figures, was not placeable to her.
“Regan,” the person said. “Remember? Regan, from that Unified Theory party earlier this summer.” She was. She was the same Regan Cassie had met along with Mark and Mark’s editor Deron when she brought him to that TUT party, who for a substantial part of the evening she’d been certain was named Jordan. Cassie still hadn’t quite found the wherewithal to speak aloud that recognition, but neither was Regan the kind of person who would be willing to stop long enough to force her to acknowledge what they both clearly understood. “So you’ll take the job.”
“The job,” Cassie said.
“The research director position at RazorWire.” Regan was pointing back up at the building where Cassie had just finished her interview. “I was the one who recommended you. I’m director of content there.” Cassie mentioned that Regan had said she worked for some socialist or anarchist journal when they met just months before. She must have left that job? “So you do remember me, then. Good. Oh, I still do the Czolgosz gig on the side when I have the time. But it’s a labor of love. Working at RazorWire is a job. The minuscule amount of skillz that pay the not-so-minuscule billz. Obviously. You must have some bills. Seriously. We’d love to have you join.”
Cassie fumbled her phone back into her pocket, and left her hand in there after, feeling for the first time some warmth return to her fingers.
“It’s an opportunity,” Cassie said.
“It is that,” Regan said. “I went to bat for you for it in a major way. Don’t fuck it up.” She looked directly into Cassie’s eyes, so directly Cassie felt compelled to look down at her own feet. By the time Cassie looked back up, which was not seconds later, Regan had already turned and walked into the building’s tiny lobby and out of view. Cassie realized that she had now been standing more or less in the middle of the sidewalk on Mott Street for five solid minutes, and that if she was going to have any luck making her call to Natalia she would need more privacy. She walked up to Houston and back across town until, wending her way through the quaintest cobblestoned blocks in Lower Manhattan, she found the stairs up to Housing Works. She ordered a drip coffee, pulled a copy of Emerson’s Collected Writings off the shelf, and called Natalia. She told her about the offer.
“Jesus, that’s a lot of money,” she said. “That’s like, ‘Go ahead and own your own Econoline van for tour’ money. Of course you take it. And oh, man, will your Pussy Willow be miffed when he hears.”
Cassie was off the call with Natalia and back to her coffee and looking around the wide-open space of the café in Housing Works before she took in what that last comment of Natalia’s meant, what it would mean to tell Mark about this new gig. He’d been finished with magazines—a job he’d gotten her into in the first place, a job she’d never trained for, never wanted, and never sought herself—and finished with a New York he could no longer afford, while giving over his life to an attack on the impossibility of finding a job, and now here she was, still three years away from thirty and living in New York and about to draw a substantial salary for doing a job she wouldn’t ever have wanted until it was offered to her. Which was one definition, she supposed, of work: doing something you don’t want to do in exchange for money. That wasn’t Mark’s definition of work. It was something like the exact opposite of his idea of work. But it was just about everybody else’s. She didn’t realize it when she was in the RazorWire office, but it was Mark she was thinking of when she tried to imagine someone so scrupulous they wouldn’t even consider taking a job like the one she was about to take. Mark’s definition of work was more like: doing a thing you love so much, with such artful labor and natural talent, it doesn’t matter how much you get paid for that work, or by whom. Or if you get paid at all, even. You’d do it anyway. That was surely not how she would view this RazorWire job, or how anyone there viewed it. And it occurred to her how many of her views of the world were her espousing Mark’s views, or her father’s—or Natalia’s, for that matter.
She would have to take the job.
It didn’t change her view of Mark’s protest, his quixotic Boom Boom revolution—if anything, it only intensified her support of it—or of him, anyway—clarified the need and immediacy of the argument he wanted to make so publicly. Because who wouldn’t want to live in a world where people were given an opportunity to do the thing they loved most, as opposed to not being invested in the work being a precondition of doing that work? Mark’s Boom Boom fanaticism was about a certain kind of love, it occurred to her, and it was a variety of love she’d like to support. But it still didn’t preclude her from taking this new job. If so arbitrary an offer could come to her, in an office chilled and bocce-courted or shuffle-boarded and populated by humans born after 1985, Isaac Abramson was more right than he even knew about how fucked the landscape had grown.
That still didn’t mean Cassie was stupid enough to contact Mark about it, or about anything, until she had to. She understood that he still love
d her, or lusted for her, or just wanted to be around her, and something about that sense of neediness pushed her away from him. The Willow Gardens didn’t have any gigs lined up again until a possible spot opening for Punch Brothers at Mercury Lounge in early December—that one hadn’t yet been confirmed, Natalia was helping out—and there wasn’t much reason for Cassie to e-mail or call. And since he’d grown so obsessed with his Boomer Missives and whatever weird stuff he was up to surrounding them, he hadn’t gotten in touch with her much, either. There was an irony in her ability to keep track of Mark by watching him on the Internet, now two levels removed, in time and in space, from him. It allowed her to feel as if they were in touch, knowing she could see him, and it allowed her to absolve herself of whatever implicit guilt she might feel in not getting in touch.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HER FIRST MONTH WORKING AT RAZORWIRE, Cassie found herself acclimating to the office environment, a fact that was both true of all office experiences and one that was born of the relative lack of difficulty in her duties themselves. The Native Content Division of the company wasn’t technically a “division”—it wasn’t divided from anything physically, or conceptually for that matter. Cassie was assigned a long desk by a wall as far from the windows looking out on Mott Street as any in the office, and while her e-mail had the title “Director of Research, Native Content Division, RazorWirePublications” added to the automatic signature stamped at the bottom, there wasn’t anything for her to direct. She did not have any subordinates. There was no budget to hire other fact-checkers, and so there was no one to oversee or whose work to coordinate. The work itself moved fast. Mario sent out an e-mail company-wide, telling all editors that each native content piece they worked up should be fed into a Google Doc, which Cassie would open, fact-check, and sign off on before it went live, by placing in caps her initials, CB, at the bottom.
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