The Final Word Read Free

feature as invisible sources. Modern journalism is characterized by an informed common sense that tends to change societal problems into informational problems, and the public arena into talk shows and infotainment. Openly commercial and biased journalism is gaining more and more ground. The traditional journalistic ideal (reflect what is actually happening, examine and criticize power, act as a channel between government and governed) has become counterproductive . . .
    He shut the book.
    We live our lives as we live our days
, it had said on hisbreakfast bill at the hotel in Oslo, where he had been at a seminar with the family who owned the paper. The words had hit him like a punch in the gut. A cold sweat had broken on his palms. How did he live his days? How had he lived his life? That day in Norway, in a windowless conference room, they had discussed the digitalization of the media; today, their hopes for tomorrow’s front page rested upon two women exchanging barely literate insults on social media that no one in their right mind would read.
    He sat down again, his knees aching, and ran his fingers over the stacks of papers on his desk. Maybe he should have started his own business, built a house, had children, done something of lasting value. But he had done nothing like that: he had built for today, not the future; he had spent his entire working life defining and trying to explain the society he lived in, trying to make it better, fairer. He had his reputation, his role in media history. He was hardly likely to leave anything else behind.
    He looked out at the newsroom. How was he going to do this? Throughout all his years at the paper he had worked ceaselessly on development, nurturing colleagues to fill the posts that were required to keep finances and headlines alike in the black. But the industry wasn’t the only thing that kept changing: time itself kept being redrawn, and there were no maps. He was navigating the jungle on adrenalin and instinct, doing his best to avoid chasms and landmines. He had managed to fashion a number ofcolleagues into key figures within the organization, in news, sport, entertainment, online, arts and television. They had all had to define their own roles in the new, uncharted media landscape, and he was proud of them, of himself, and his capacity to see what was coming.
    But there was one overriding role that he had not managed to reconstruct: his own, model 2.0. A publisher with freedom of speech in his very marrow, lack of respect in his heart, technology at the forefront of his mind. He hadn’t had time to do it: the days were too short, passed too quickly, and now it was too late.
    There was so much time, until it was suddenly too late.
    Objective, critical, informative journalism, the way everyone knew it, everyone active today, would be no more than a short parenthesis in the history of humankind, and he was at the helm while they headed straight for Hell.
    The morning’s heavy rain had eased, leaving the streets dank and dark. The cold front was on its way north, and Mediterranean heat was due to reach central Sweden that afternoon. Annika could already feel the humidity on her skin. The traffic was moving like treacle so she ignored the buses and walked fast along the pavement.
    She cut through Rålambshovsparken and into the labyrinth of streets and alleys that made up Kungsholmen. She could find her way without thinking: she would walk and walk and suddenly find herself somewhere withoutbeing aware of how she had got there. The buildings leaned conspiratorially towards her, whispering a welcome. She had ended up among these streets when she had first arrived in Stockholm, in an unmodernized flat tucked away in a courtyard on Agnegatan, with just a cold tap and a bathroom in the basement of the adjacent building. And that building over there was where she had lived, in a magnificent apartment looking out on to Hantverkargatan, with Thomas when the children were young –