NOTE: the Daily Bugle and all its staff, are the property of Marvel. No violation of copyright is intended and no money will be made.
The catastrophe of New York City was a major success for the New York Daily Bugle. This was not to say that they did not feel it as much as anyone else; after all, they were as New Yorker as anyone, and they personally suffered as much loss. But the paper's peculiar structure performed magnificently; especially in the first 24 hours, all the world's media ended up feeding on it like a gigantic calf on a milk-rich cow (and one that did not neglect to charge according to the value of its services). As a result, New York City's cantankerous old uncle of a newspaper not only received three months' income from foreign and out-of-town news companies in a week, but increased permanently its roster of international contacts and buyers, who had been made aware, as they had not been before, of the depth and variety of its sources.
Jameson is celebrated for his penny-pinching. This image may be exaggerated – like his reputation for hating superheroes in general and Spider-Man in particular. Jameson, it's true, has always disliked superheroes, regarding them as a public danger; something on which quite a few people agreed with him. (And more would after the New York catastrophe.) When Spider-Man first appeared in New York, he clearly was the most powerful vigilante since the days of Captain America, and his costume and identity were disturbing. As one of Jameson's researchers discovered, there had been a singularly ugly pulp character by the same name in the thirties, a villain who ate people. The discovery went around the world, and it took years for Spider-Man to clear his reputation. He and his fans were justifiably resentful of Jameson and his paper, but the truth is that any journalist with a story like that would have published it. As it turned out, the man who is Spider-Man seems to have been the only New Yorker never to have heard of the fictional Spiderman before he put on his mask – or so he asserted in a Letterman interview, adding that he had had a very sheltered, secure upbringing. Jameson, in fact, gets a lot of profitable stories from superhero activities, and has a few freelancers on tap who specialize in the field. Over the years, his activism in this field has done a lot to keep readers buying his publications.
As for his penny-pinching, there is something to be said for it – and it's not just his Scottish descent, as irreverent staffers suggest. He has, after all, to keep the last of the old-fashioned independent newspapers alive against the competition of the fashionable New York Times and the thuggish Murdoch chain, both of whose resources dwarf his. In such a situation, controlling expenses is a necessity; and it does not keep Jameson from paying for journalistic living legends such as Fred Foswell or Peter Parker, or from keeping up the whole network of Junior Bugle Clubs. An interesting anecdote comes from a man who had been sacked by the Times, and went looking to him for a job. During his interview, Jameson said to him: "Don't tell me what the Times used to pay you. Or if you have to, then lie to me. I don't want to have to think about what another newspaper was paying, only about what your work seems worth to me." And when the man was asked what pay rate he got in the end, he said, with a slightly surprised, expression, "Fair. Very fair."
Until recently, Jameson used to claim that he had never hired a journalism graduate in his life. He no longer could make the claim, since a couple of excellent female writers had joined his staff, but he retained his hearty contempt for the idea of learning journalism anywhere except in the streets and in the editorial offices, watching other journalists as they work. Journalism, he would say, is not a technique: it is vision and interpretation. All you have to know is what you see, and how you feel about it.
As a matter of fact, there was a bit of humbug about this. Jameson did not need to wait for any random ambitious person to walk in with a story. Shortly after the foundation of the first Flatbush Daily Bugle, his great-grandfather, Dirk Van Koudenhove, had noticed the growing popularity of Horatio Alger stories about enterprising, hard-working young men, and had an idea to offer boys – and, soon, girls – the opportunity to do it for real. After many changes and crises, what emerged was a number of Junior Bugle Clubs, spread across the metropolitan area. Each of these clubs is supervised by a former or current Bugle staffer, and produces its own irregular newssheet, from news stories gathered and written up by members. The authors share copyright 50%-50% with the Bugle corporation, who also syndicate and distribute anything that seems worth wider attention – humorous reports, dramatic first-person accounts, or just beautiful and poetic photos.
This was the inexhaustible mine of talent from which the Bugle picked most of its staffers. It had been there for Dirk van Koudenhove and his daughter Charlotte. Charlotte's feckless son Ebenezer Jameson had let them drift, but his determined and temperamental heir Jonah had seen their potential even before he was assigned to one as the supervising professional, and had worked determinedly for years to put them back on their feet. At a time of crisis for newspapers in general, many executives, especially on the financial side, wanted to write them off as a needless prestige project. Jameson had to accept two or three resignations as the price of having his way. It was at that time that the joke started going round the company, that his theme tune was Elvis Presley's "Trouble"("If you're lookin' for trouble, You've come to the right place; If you're lookin' for trouble, Just look right in my face…"). Jameson's only reaction was to ask – in an exaggerated Noo Yawk accent – whether they'd ever heard him talk Appalachian like that.
Those days were long past, although "Trouble" is still whistled cheerfully in the Bugle corridors. The Junior Clubs proved their worth many times already. But the Catastrophe was their triumph. Within an hour of he catastrophe, individual junior clubs had logged on the Bugle network and were producing material. While other news organizations were hopelessly disorganized, their studios and offices devastated and out of power, their staff either out of touch or scattered in the suburbs, the Junior clubs produced literally hundreds of memorable, publication-worthy reports and pictures: eyewitness reports of the raising of the island, with photographs taken from below; descriptions of the flight of Manhattan people through Riker's Island Bridge, Verrazzano Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and so on; interviews with survivors and rescuers; and a few, unforgettable long landscape shots of Manhattan, broken and smoking.
But nobody felt like celebrating. Everyone had lost something, or someone. Jameson sat in his office and would not let anyone in. Later it was said that he had given every last penny he had personally earned from the catastrophe to charity.
...
Buffy had not had nightmares since she had been twelve. Waking up now from one and finding, not Sammy, but Jen, looking at her with alarm and compassion, was… unsettling. After their quarrel the previous day, Buffy did not really feel she liked to have been helpless before Sammy's ward when she had known her for so short a time. There was, for a while, a nervous silence in the house.
