Cover

THE BYSTANDER

1.

The girl from Vice stands at my office door. I left her no choice, she says. She tried calling, e-mailing. “Can we talk?”

I know she’s a novice by her posture of defiance. She’s worked herself up to this.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. It’s been chaotic.” From behind my desk, I motion for her to come in. “Just close the door.”

The girl drops into the chair, cold cheeks flushed, snow melting in her hair. She’s maybe twenty-five. Without asking, she takes her iPhone out and starts recording.

“Sorry,” she says, catching herself. “It’s okay if I record?”

I nod and she roots through her tote bag for her notepad. By the time she produces it, scraggly white headphones pulled along, she’s out of breath and has to reset her focus. Then she takes out the heavy book and sets it on my desk: The Complete Bystander, 1999–2003. They’ve printed all thirty-three of the magazine’s issues to scale.

“Can I begin with a confession?” she says. “The Bystander was huge for me in high school, your work in particular.”

I loft a smile over the desk.

“In fact you’re one of the reasons I wanted to get into media.”

“How have you found it?”

“Obviously we’re living in a different time.” She glances quickly at her phone and then at me, at the bandage on my wrist. “Like Gordon Stone writes in the introduction, the Bystander was maybe the last magazine of its kind, the last to start up, I mean, and go all-in with print. What was the minimum rate, like, two-fifty a word? It feels like a million years ago.”

“How much are you getting for this?” I ask.

“One-fifty.”

“A word?”

“God no. A hundred-fifty bucks. It’s online only. I hope that’s okay.”

“Of course.” After a pause, I ask, “Do you regret becoming a journalist?”

“Every first of the month.” She laughs. “You get into it thinking you’ll have a life like your idols, but the economics have shifted. I guess that’s why so many people have gotten out.”

From my office at Diamond Communications, you can see the Hudson’s cobalt crawl between buildings. If you’d asked, when I was at the Bystander, what I’d be in fifteen years, I would’ve said editor-in-chief or even publisher, not some associate consultant. But it wasn’t money that drove me from the business.

“It’s funny, because we’re needed more than ever, don’t you think?” she says. “We have to sift the facts from the fiction.”

I nod in the direction of the book on the desk. “That’s what Mort Brewer always said.”

“It’s the truth, don’t you think?”