He found himself in an unusual mood. The melancholy that had begun after edition settled heavily on him as he carefully pushed the stiff, narrow brush through each of the six chambers. The day’s excitement now felt like a last hurrah. This story had legs, and would keep running, but he couldn’t imagine that he would ever again preside over a splash like the one that would be on newsstands in the morning. He was glad to have had it. He wouldn’t have wanted simply to wane towards the point where his body and his weariness overcame him. And it had been quite a hurrah. Perhaps even the high-water mark of his career. Lucky to have it so close to the end.

Among the small group of national-newspaper editors, he was already the last of his own kind – the old-fashioned newsmen who could calculate newsprint by the bale and knew the weight of a barrel of ink. Those who’d actually worked on Fleet Street, and done so in its long noontime, when the pubs were thronged with hacks, and the Beast, the Brute and the others in the pack between them sold more copies every day than there were households in Britain. He remembered the zenith itself from his childhood, when his father wrote for the Brute and a single edition could shift more than nine million copies. Nine million! Even tomorrow’s wouldn’t manage much more than two.

He pushed the long brush through the barrel, turning it slowly in his hand with the rifling. There was hardly any dirt. It was a long time since the gun had been fired. He should make sure that it still worked.

The Brute now was on its knees, not able to pay enough journalists to get enough good stories to get enough circulation to bring in enough income: the terminal spiral. The Beast didn’t even attack it any more. That, too, was a tragedy, to see a century’s ferocious competition reduced to pity. He laid the brush aside.

Of the papers that were still fighting, there was just one that outsold the Beast: that upstart builder’s rag the Fun, but it was just topless girls and smutty jokes, hardly a newspaper at all. And even it had lost half a million readers in the past five years. Moreover, the Beast had decisively outflanked it. Because only he, he alone, had seen right away and with total clarity that the internet would usher in the end of newspapers, and understood then that the race, which didn’t seem even to have begun when he founded BeastOnline, was to the death.