A Scourge of Vipers Read Free

join the rest of the moochers who live off food stamps and unemployment checks.”
    Chuckie-boy was on to me. If I quit, I wouldn’t qualify for unemployment. If he let me go, I could live off Uncle Sugar while I figured out what the hell to do next.
    â€œWell,” he said, “it’s not going to work.”
    â€œOh, darn.”
    â€œThere’s a stack of press releases on your desk. Get cracking.”
    I’d never worked for anyone who said “get cracking” before, and I didn’t like it. It made me want to crack his head. As I turned to leave, he pulled a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer from his desk drawer and shot a dab into his palm. Funny. I didn’t remember us shaking hands.
    The football-field-size newsroom felt hollow as I trudged to my cubicle past the handful of reporters and editors still employed there. Twenty-two years ago, when I hired on as a cub reporter, the place bustled day and night. The news department numbered three hundred and forty then, and they were the very best at what they did, making The Dispatch one of the finest small-city metros in the country. But decades of declining circulation and advertising revenue had taken a toll. By the time the local owners finally gave up and sold out last year, the news staff had already been reduced to eighty. At the time, it was hard to imagine it could get any smaller. Our new corporate overlords promptly cut it in half.
    They accomplished this—yes, they trumpeted it as an accomplishment—by eliminating the copy desk, firing the entire photo staff, and giving cameras to the reporters, most of whom didn’t know which end of the lens to look through. Now our stories, along with those from the chain’s twenty-seven other piece-of-shit dailies, were e-mailed to GCHI’s “international editing center,” located in a strip mall on the outskirts of Wichita. There, junior-college dropouts with a tenuous grasp of English grammar checked them over and e-mailed them back. Because they had never laid eyes on Providence, thought Rhode Island was an island, and couldn’t locate New England on a map, the chances of them catching our green reporters’ mistakes were close to zero.
    On today’s front page, Aborn Street appeared as Auburn Street, State Senator Parker Smyth was identified as U.S. Senator Parker Smith, Burnside Park was rechristened Sideburns Park, and the Woonasquatucket River was spelled three different ways, each of them wrong.
    Not much real journalism was getting done either. Gone were the days of aggressive political and criminal justice reporting, sophisticated science and religion writing, blanket coverage of all thirty-nine Rhode Island cities and towns, and blockbuster investigations that had sent scores of politicians, mobsters, and crooked businessmen to the gray-bar hotel. Now the news pages were filled with rewritten press releases, crime news cribbed from police reports, fawning features about our few remaining advertisers, and columns of clumsily cut wire copy. Meetings and press conferences were often covered by monitoring the local-access cable TV channel. Our reporters were seldom allowed out of the office, dispatched only when a three-alarm fire broke out or a grisly murder was committed—this thanks to our former TV producer’s “if it bleeds it leads” news philosophy. On most days, the longest story in the paper was the list of corrections on page two. I used to be proud to work at The Dispatch. Now it was a freaking embarrassment.
    Late that afternoon, I was rewriting a press release touting the Providence Place Mall’s fabulous upcoming St. Patrick’s Day celebration (“Fun for the whole family!”) when Chuckie-boy summoned me again.
    â€œChannel 10 is saying the cops have fished a body out of the Seekonk River just above the falls in Pawtucket.”
    â€œIt’s the Blackstone River,” I said.
    â€œExcuse