Nothing to Offer a Paper? 3

This is Part Three of a series. Parts One and Two are immediately below. If you haven’t already, please read those first.

It’s a long flight from New York to Anchorage, and upon arrival at about midnight, I walked outside, blinking and squinting, into sunshine and birdsong. It was about May 1, and the days were eerily long in the way I remembered from my time in West Berlin (which is about as far north as Juneau. )

The Anchorage Times newsroom, when I reached it at nine the next morning, wasn’t much bigger than that of Energy User News but it was jammed with male and female reporters who seemed uncommonly friendly toward the new guy. I sat among them and answered questions: Where had I worked before? Why did I want to work  here? 

“Well,” I said, Alaska is inherently interesting, and you won that Pulitzer Prize. Let me see the story. It must be quite something.”

A queer silence descended. Finally, a slightly older reporter broke it. “That was the other paper,” he said. “You want the Anchorage Daily News.” 

I had applied to the wrong newspaper. And now, having invested the time and money to move here from New York, I was stuck with the fruit of my mistake.