“…No, this angle’s too blurry, you can’t make out Cherrier’s face at all…
can’t typeset something like this.”
“It’s the closest shot I got of Cherrier out of the whole roll.
They ran me off the property right after.”
“Then we scrap the piece.
That’s it.”
“And then what, we’re short on material again this week?
That’s three weeks running now.
Layout keeps coming up thin, and if this keeps going…”
Clang—
The door banging open cut the argument dead.
“Morning, Colin.”
Old John looked up from the typesetting machine, adjusted the brass glasses perched on his nose, and folded his weathered face into a smile — deep creases carved into a body worn thin by hard years.
“Morning, John.”
Colin shrugged out of his coat and hat, hung them on the rack by the door, nodded toward Old John hunched over the heavy machine, then let his gaze drift to the man beside him — blank-faced, quiet.
“…And morning to you too, Little John.”
“M-Morning, Colin.”
A stiff smile cracked across Little John’s dull expression, his hands never leaving the camera slung around his neck.
Old John caught the flat reply, shook his head — something between fondness and exhaustion — then turned back to Colin.
“Boss, sales dropped again this week.
Newsboys are saying more than half the run didn’t move.
Had to dump the leftovers at half price just to clear the stack.
Keeps up like this, they’re not going to bother delivering for us anymore…”
Different from the Anti-World in one crucial way.
Same industry, same grind of ink and deadlines — but here, Colin wasn’t chasing stories anymore.
He owned the paper.
Owned this paper, specifically.
And judging by what Old John wasn’t quite saying, “owned” was starting to look like a liability rather than an achievement.
The Depression had its claws in every industry across the country, and newsprint was no exception.
The Messenger hadn’t been spared.
And now, with child labor protections working their way through the reformers’ agenda—
advocates had pushed the reforms through, and the newsboy working age had climbed right in the middle of the Depression — which meant the cheap labor small operations like The Messenger depended on had just gotten a lot harder to find.
Lose the newsboys, watch the printing and delivery costs climb right behind them.
And sales that were already limping got worse from there.
“I know.”
Colin didn’t say much else.
Just a nod, acknowledgment that the situation had landed on him and he wasn’t blind to it.
Truth was, the whole mess sat heavy in his chest too, and he didn’t have a clean answer for any of it.
A week into this body, a week of digging through drawers and ledgers, and Colin had already pieced together how deep the hole went.
The newspaper had been circling the drain long before he ever showed up in it.
Proof of that sat in his own desk drawer — a bank mortgage certificate, folded up and forgotten, still waiting on a signature that would never come now.
Because the bank Colin had planned on mortgaging the paper to didn’t exist anymore.
Gone the way half the banks in the country had gone, swallowed whole by the Depression before the ink on any deal could dry.
Colin’s jaw tightened.
He crossed the room, dropped into the chair behind his desk.
His silence didn’t help the room breathe any easier.
If anything, it thickened.
Old John kept working the typesetting keys, but his fingers had lost their rhythm, worry etched into every line of his face.
A man his age, cut loose from a job — there wasn’t another one waiting.
Not for him.
Not anywhere.
And it wasn’t just Old John’s neck on the line.
Little John’s too.
Father and son, both of them, tangled up in the same failing paper.
One collapse, and it took the whole family down with it.
Little John caught the tension rolling off his father in waves.
Opened his mouth like he meant to say something to Colin.
Then thought better of it.
Let his head drop instead, shoulders sagging under something he didn’t have words for.
“There’s really nothing left to try?”
Colin muttered it to himself, low, barely more than breath, staring down at the desk like it might answer him back.
If there was a way around it, Colin didn’t want the paper going under.
Not even close.
Not in this economy.
Not when the paper folding meant Old John and his son weren’t the only ones hitting the pavement — Colin would be right there with them, no boss title left to hide behind.
The thought crawled under his skin.
He shifted in his chair, couldn’t quite sit still with it.
He had zero interest in joining the ranks of men drifting aimless through New York’s streets.
Wanting something and getting it, though — two very different animals.
And right now, watching sales slide the way they were, that vagrant future looked less like a nightmare and more like a schedule.
“No.”
He shook his head, shoved the spiraling thoughts back down, forced his mind onto something useful.
A newspaper drowning like this didn’t have many lifelines left to grab.
Realistically, one.
Sell more papers.
The big names — Fortune, The Wall Street Journal — had taken their hit early on, sales cratering right alongside everyone else’s.
But they’d found their way out fast: flood the pages with job listings, and suddenly every desperate worker in the city had a reason to buy that day’s edition.
Sales stabilized.
Crisis, more or less, managed.
Except that trick only worked if you had the connections to pull it off.
Networks, contacts, decades of relationships turned into leverage.
That’s what the big papers were sitting on.
The Messenger had none of that.
Never had.
It ran on neighborhood gossip and local color, not industry pull.
And no business owner in his right mind was spending advertising money on job listings in a weekly nobody with real hiring power actually read.
The Messenger used to run daily, actually — before the Depression forced it into survival mode.
Cost-cutting, format changes, the slow bleed down to a weekly.
None of it had moved the needle much.
“…Boost sales.
Sure.
Easy.”
Colin exhaled, quiet, and let his eyes drift to the stack of old papers piled up on the corner of his desk.
The pile kept growing along with The Messenger’s unsold copies — nothing else to do with them but stack them higher.
He pulled one out at random, flipped it open.
A write-up on the premiere of City Lights, the silent picture, stared back at him from the page.
Directed by, starring, and stamped through with the fingerprints of one man: Charlie Chaplin, the reigning master of comedy on film.
City Lights hadn’t come easy.
Talking pictures had just crashed onto the scene, and the shift was rewriting the rules of Chaplin’s whole career out from under him.
Three years, start to finish, just to wrestle this one film into existence.
Word going around said even Chaplin himself hadn’t been sure it would land.
No confidence in the box office.
None.
Then it opened, and the city lost its mind over it.
Premiere night, the theater sat buried under fans, crowds packed so thick the surrounding shop windows actually gave way under the pressure — bad enough that police had to be called in just to keep the street from turning into a riot.
And this wasn’t some ordinary release date.
This landed dead center in the worst stretch of the Depression, the absolute bottom of it.
A film succeeding that hard in that kind of economy said everything that needed saying about Chaplin’s talent, and the picture’s.
One more detail worth noting: Einstein himself sat in that premiere audience.
By the time the lights came up, the man was in tears.
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