It was even worse than they thought.
According to Rick, The Peak was running out of gas. If the newspaper were one of those old coal-powered trains, now would be the time to start throwing luggage and furniture into the furnace, all in the name of maintaining a little forward momentum.
And yet it wasn’t that the Metro had put a huge dent in The Peak’s pick-up rate after all. Apparently students weren’t omnivores so much as scavengers, willing to ingest whatever print media was closest at hand. Usually that did mean the daily, with its ever-present green pillboxes. But not always.
No, the real problem had deeper roots. And it wasn’t complicated: advertisers, most of them on-campus businesses, hated The Peak. They’d hated it for years, it turned out—its delusions of grandeur, not to mention its patronizing anti-capitalist pose—but until now they’d never had an alternative. As soon as the slightest wedge of competition forced itself in, virtually all of them jumped ship.
Monopolies, said the member representing alumni, tend to work like that.
As Rick explained to the others, his voice scary-calm, a metal ruler serving as his makeshift pointer, what had to happen next was the equivalent of emergency surgery. There were tough decisions to be made at every level of the entire operation. Should they drop their page counts? Cut wages, or entire sections? Switch to online-only? Nothing was off the table at this point. And while Rick appreciated that each member had the right to disagree with his assessment, the fact was—now swatting the ruler against his palm with a cleaver’s thwack—that unless something drastic was done right away, pretty soon there wouldn’t be a rest-of-the-board to have these disagreements with.
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees on the spot. Everyone felt mildewy and uncomfortable in their seats. Rachel and Suze, the two staff representatives, felt so unprepared for this news that they couldn’t muster a single argument in their defence between them. Even the usual row of pizzas sat untouched for most of the meeting, until one judicious board member pointed out that if they were thrown away, the list of unnecessary expenses would only grow a little longer. The slices were folded up in jagged pieces of paper towel and stuffed into pockets and handbags to be eaten, maybe a little guiltily, later on.