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first day."
    "There'll be other stories."
    Greg pointed out the illogic of using the anchorman. "The key camera shot into the limousine shows her in one-quarter profile in the foreground asking the question and the commissioner looking right at her and answering. Harris is nowhere around."
    Stew nodded in comprehension. "No way will it look like Harris's piece."
    "It has to be her package. And it should be."
    "You really think she's going to work out?"
    Greg nodded. "I wish I could take the credit, but it was her scoop all the way." He allowed himself a smile. "She had me scared shitless."
    Greg would make such an admission only to Stew, who had hired him at a TV station in Pittsburgh four and a half years earlier, just after Greg was graduated from Yale. The station had been short a news writer. Greg had never considered news as a career. He had simply possessed a burning desire to get into television.
    Stew had mournfully opened the job interview by asking, "If viewers were really interested in what was happening in the world, would most of them be content to get their news in minute-and-a-half chunks from us?"
    He had released a puff of pipe smoke as regretfully as if it had been hope. "You probably have too good an education for this business. But maybe an English major from Yale can write and just maybe he's smart enough to know what he's getting into. Should I give you the benefit of the doubt?"
    "How about if we flip for it?" Greg asked.
    Stew thought the remark funny and confident enough to hire the young man to write copy for the early evening news broadcast.
    Greg had learned quickly and was willing to work hard, and perhaps most important he thrived under the stress of deadlines as the clock hands moved toward six o'clock and the last edits and rewrites were feverishly locked into place. He was soon elevated to producer. No one suspected that Greg's determination camouflaged working-class desperation.
    When Stew's success in Pittsburgh caused him to be hired to invigorate the news operation at FBS's Los Angeles station, he asked Greg to come along as senior producer. That was seven months earlier. Greg was twenty-six.
    "We still have to work up ways to enhance Harris's image," Stew said, fingering his beard and eyeing Greg thoughtfully. "It might become your headache. Trying to do two jobs, I'm not doing either well. I have three options: The first is going outside for an executive producer. The second is promoting Bosworth."
    "You don't sound convinced."
    Stew nodded. "Bosworth is okay at producing the late news since it's mostly stories from the six o'clock, but he doesn't exactly inspire faith as a creative thinker."
    "You said it might become my headache. I hope I'm the third option."
    Stew shrugged. "I'm considering it. You're young. I don't know whether you're too inexperienced . . . or whether you have . . ." His voice trailed off in thought.
    "What?"
    "There's a fine line between what will grab an audience and responsible journalism. I know you'll put together an entertaining broadcast—sexy story ideas, great visuals—but that's not the same as informing viewers about what's important to their lives."
    "I think after all this time in news I understand the difference, Stew."
    "Look, I'm not saying you have to be a fanatic, one of those types for whom news is some kind of a holy calling they'd die for. Put nine out of ten of those guys in charge of a broadcast and they would die  in the ratings. So boring nobody would watch. But you have to understand that with most people getting their news from us nowadays, we have a big responsibility, an obligation."
    Greg knew that Stew liked to make a show of his dedication to journalism at a time when entertainment values in news production were being emphasized to attract viewers. But Greg also knew him to be a canny innovator who had livened the news presentation in Pittsburgh and again here in Los Angeles.
    "If you're asking whether I have integrity," Greg