Big Trouble Read Online Free

had been to fight for Justice by using his English-major skills to root out and expose corruption. He got a job at a small daily newspaper, where he wrote obituaries and covered municipal meetings in which local elected officials and engineering consultants droned on for hours over what diameter pipe they needed for the new sewer line. Eliot, listening to this, slumped over a spiral reporter’s notebook covered with doodles, figured there was probably some corruption going on there somewhere, but he had no idea how even to begin looking for it.
    By the time he’d moved up to the big-time city newspaper, he’d given up on trying to root things out and settled into the comfortable niche of writing features, which it turned out he was good at. For years he wrote about pretty much whatever he wanted. Mostly he wrote what the higher honchos in the newsroom referred to, often condescendingly, as “offbeat” stories. They preferred issues stories, which were dense wads of facts, written by committees, running in five or six parts under some title that usually had the word “crisis” in it, like “Families in Crisis,” “Crisis in Our Schools,” “The Coming Water Crisis,” et cetera. These series, which were heavily promoted and often won journalism contests, were commonly referred to in the newsroom as “megaturds.” But the honchos loved them. Advocacy journalism, it was called. It was the hot trend in the newspaper business. Making a difference! Connecting with the readers!
    Eliot thought that the readership of most of these series consisted almost entirely of contest judges. But more and more, he found himself getting ordered to work on mega-turds, leaving less and less time for him to work on stories he thought somebody might actually want to read.
    The end came on the day when he was summoned to the office of the managing editor, Ken Deeber, who was seven years younger than Eliot. Eliot remembered when Deeber was a general-assignment reporter, just out of Princeton. He was articulate and personable, and he could be absolutely relied on to get at least one important fact wrong in every story, no matter how short. But Deeber did not write many stories; he was too busy networking. He rose through the ranks like a Polaris missile, becoming the youngest managing editor in the paper’s history. He was big on issues stories. That’s why he summoned Eliot to his office.
    â€œHow’s it going, Eliot?” Deeber had said, starting things off. “Everything OK with you?”
    â€œWell,” said Eliot, “I’m kind of . . .”
    â€œThe reason I ask,” said Deeber, who was not the least bit interested in whether or not everything was OK with Eliot, “is that John Croton tells me you haven’t turned in a thing on the day-care project.”
    The day-care project was the current megaturd. It was going to explain to the readers, in five parts with fourteen color charts, that there was a crisis in day care.
    â€œListen, Ken,” said Eliot, “There are already five people working on the . . .”
    â€œEliot,” said Deeber, the way a parent talks to a naughty child, “you were given an assignment .”
    Eliot’s assignment was to write a sidebar about the Haitian community’s perspective on the day-care crisis. Deeber believed that every story had to have the perspective of every ethnic group. When he went through the newspaper, he didn’t actually read the stories; he counted ethnic groups. He was always sending out memos like: While the story on the increase in alligator attacks on golfers was timely and informative, I think more of an effort could have been made to include the Hispanic viewpoint . The main reason why Deeber’s car ignition had never been wired to a bomb is that reporters have poor do-it-yourself skills.
    â€œI know I had an assignment,” said Eliot. “But I’ve been