Page 3 of Barre Fight
Ivy marched through the newsroom, threw herself into her chair, and tapped on her keyboard to wake up her computer.
“Good one for you this morning,” she said breathlessly to her boss as she dumped her shoulder bag on her desk, not bothering with pleasantries. At the other end of their long shared desk, Alan didn’t reply. He usually didn’t fully wake up until after his third coffee anyway. “I’ll file in a few minutes, and we can get it up fast.”
More silence from the other end of the desk, but theSydney Morning Sun’s open-plan newsroom was already fairly busy,with the familiar sounds of phones ringing and reporters chatting playing in the background. Eventually, Alan spoke.
“I’ve got a meeting with the boss in twenty,” he said gruffly. Ivy glanced over at him, typing as she watched him run a distracted hand through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. He didn’t even look like he’d had his second coffee yet.
“Can you look at this before you go? It’s a big one. A principal at Australian National Ballet got in a fistfight at a pub last night and there’svideo. He knocked the guy out cold. We can put a big hed on it, something like… ‘Ballet Dancer Caught on Video Starting Bar Brawl.’ Give me five minutes, okay? I’ll file it clean.” Alan merely grunted in reply.
“Okay, that’s live,” he grumbled a short while later. Ivy glanced at the time in the corner of her screen, tossed her golden-brown hair over her shoulder, and gave the lapels of her black blazer a triumphant little tug.
“And with two minutes to spare.” She grinned, pulling up the link to the story and preparing to share it on all the arts section’s social media channels. “Good luck with the big boss.”
Another grunt as Alan stood, his shoulders hunched even higher than usual, and trudged away. Alan was a bit of a curmudgeon, and an absolute stickler about dangling participles, but Ivy liked him. In the seven years she’d worked for him at theMorning Sun, he’d taught her a lot (including that a dangling participle was a cardinal sin on par with kitten murder). He pushed her, too, to make her stories as clickable as possible, part of his mission—their shared mission, really—to make the arts as relevant and accessible to readers in a city obsessed with rugby and real estate. Sometimes that meant taking an edgy angle, but Ivy didn’t mind. Better that people talk about dance and opera, and jazz and theater, than forget they existed. People didn’t need to love her stories, but theopposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference—and in this day and age, that was something no journalist could afford.
On the other side of the newsroom, Alan stopped in front of the frosted glass office where the editor-in-chief ensconced himself, the only person on the masthead who enjoyed the luxury of a door. Ivy watched with a frown as Alan heaved a sigh, and then he pulled the door open and disappeared inside.
A familiar foreboding prickled the back of Ivy’s shoulders, and she shrugged, trying to dispel it. They’d just had a round of layoffs a few months ago. It was too soon for another one. Hopefully this morning’s meeting with the EIC was nothing major, and when Alan got back she could pitch him a few more ideas.
In the meantime, she watched engagement on the bar brawl article climb steadily, as people weighed in on the video. With any luck this would take care of her traffic quota for the month, and she could spend the next few days working on the story Alan had okayed a few weeks ago, about the country’s first soprano to perform in a wheelchair. When that was done, she wanted to write about a sketch comedy troupe that put on performances and workshops for kids at the children’s hospital. Then, a deep dive into how the cost of living crisis was affecting the demographics of theater, opera, and ballet attendance. She smiled, allowing herself a few minutes to relish the satisfaction of seeing yet another story go up before she closed the document and moved on to the next article. Journalism wasn’t Ivy’s first idea of a dream job, but after her first dream had died, she’d built herself a career that she loved.
Half an hour later, the bar brawl story was the second most-clicked story on the site, behind an exclusive about a prominent property developer who’d been arrested for fraud. The comments section was on fire, and Ivy’s tweet about it had racked up a few hundred retweets. She was about to grab her wallet and go downstairs for another cappuccino when she sawthe EIC’s door swing open. Alan reappeared, looking even more dejected than he had when he’d gone in. Ivy watched as he ran his hand through his hair again and looked around the newsroom with a grimace, and her stomach flipped over.
She swallowed hard as Alan approached, walking like he was heading back to another four-hour performance by that Dutch experimental theater troupe that had visited Sydney last year.
“What did the big boss want?” she asked, trying and failing to inject a little brightness into her voice. The look on his face was more than merely curmudgeonly. It was grim and resigned, and the sight of it made dread simmer in Ivy’s chest.
Alan lowered himself into his chair and swiveled it slowly towards her. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough, and the simmer rose to a churning boil.
“He’s letting us go. Effective today. As part of ‘prudent cost-cutting measures to keep the paper profitable.’ I’m sorry.”
Ivy stared at him, hoping she’d misheard. She’d lived through so many rounds of layoffs and redundancies at this paper she’d lost count. Last year they’d laid off two younger reporters from the arts section, so for the last few months she’d been a senior arts reporter with no juniors. The year before that, they’d blocked Alan from hiring any interns, and with what those kids were paid they barely cost the company anything.
“I… both of us? There’ll be no one left to do arts coverage if they cut both of us.”
Alan’s lip curled. “They’re cutting the entire desk.”
“What?” Ivy shrieked, and a reporter at the business desk jumped, glanced over at her, then quickly looked away, embarrassment all over his face. Ivy had never hated the concept of an open-plan office more. It was one thing to get a tough edit within full earshot of a hundred of your colleagues, but getting laid off in public was something elseentirely.
“The entire desk?” she hissed. “How can they do that? We’re even barely a desk anyway, we’re two people putting out a section every day by the skin of our teeth.”
“And apparently that section is ‘not adequately serving our readership or contributing to our growth strategy,’” Alan muttered.
“My story is the second top story on the site right now, and if the home page gave us any kind of support it would be the top story. Alan, this is crazy.”
“I know, I know. I tried to reason with him, but it’s done. You get two months’ severance, and I get four.” Alan looked just as miserable as she felt.
“So they’re just not going to run arts stories anymore?” What about all those stories she had planned? Her interview with the soprano was scheduled for Monday morning. Hot tears gathered in her eyes and she blinked them back. Alan would be mortified if she cried in front of him, and she refused to burst into tears in front of the rest of her colleagues.Former colleagues.
“They’ll get freelancers if there’s a story they feel has to be covered, he said, but he didn’t seem to think that was going to happen very often.”
Ivy stared at him, appalled.
“So it’s over,” she said quietly. A sense of doom descended onto her, horribly familiar. It pressed down on her shoulders and constricted her chest, just as it had over a decade ago when every ballet company she’d applied to had dismissed her out of hand, sending her home after the first round of auditions. Two inches. After fifteen years of training, an entire childhood devoted to ballet, her failure to grow an extra two inches taller had ruined everything, snatching away her dream job, her dream career. Australian National Ballet hadn’t even let her audition, because their cut-off for women in the corpswas 5’4”. And now theMorning Sunwas yanking away another dream job, another career she’d devoted years to, and why? Because she couldn’t wave a magic wand and make Sydneysiders care about something other than luxury listings and rugby league?
She glanced back at her screen, where the traffic tracking website showed the numbers on her bar brawl story climbing steadily. But it was still in second place, a few thousand pageviews behind the developer story. It might as well have been two inches.
“I’m sorry,” Alan repeated gruffly, and Ivy forced herself to look at him, remembering that he was out of a job, too. “I’ll give you a great reference, I’ll connect you with anyone I know in the industry who can give you a job. Though lord knows half of them have been laid off already.”
