Laid Off But Not Lying Down
The Daily Planet’s veteran crime reporter discovers a new scene.

In 1978, one week before Christmas, Clark Kent was hired as the Daily Planet’s newest reporter on the metro crime beat. Last October he was laid off, another casualty of the newspaper industry’s current downsizing, as profits from print advertising continue to dry up and a workable business model for online ads remains elusive.

“As far back as I can remember, I wanted to work for a newspaper,” Kent said one recent afternoon at Grounded, a trendy new coffee shop on Lester Street that some residents of Metropolis view as a symbol of the surrounding neighborhood’s increasing gentrification. “It was hard not to feel like a big part of my identity had suddenly vanished.”

For the Planet and its readers, the loss of Kent is significant. Always at the scene of the crime before other reporters, he seemed able to predict when bank robberies, muggings, and acts of arson were about to occur, not to mention major attacks by criminals from foreign galaxies. “I just have a nose for news, that’s all,” Kent explained in an aw-shucks manner that betrays his small-town roots.

He doesn’t blame Planet publisher and editor Perry White for the loss of his job. The paper’s owners, however, are another matter. “Wayne Enterprises had no strategy for digging the Planet out of this mess. They’re just letting it die. We’d get these e-mails that said, ‘If you want this paper to continue being a first-rate source of news, you need to stand up and fight for it.’ Great. One more thing to do when I’m not writing copy and keeping a crime blog up to date. Next thing you know, they’ll be asking editorial to sell ads.”

Kent says he’s never met Wayne Enterprises CEO and Planet owner Bruce Wayne. “He might as well be a ghost. I don’t think Mr. White’s even met him. Everybody wishes a crazy rich guy would buy their paper these days, but you don’t want him to be so crazy he won’t even bother to send a mass e-mail when the paper’s going down the drain. I guess he’s too busy flying around in his jets.”

Still, it’s better than when Lex Luthor was in charge. “Wayne may be a military-industrial nut, but he’s not a megalomaniac, and he doesn’t tell Mr. White what he can or can’t publish. He would never buy the paper just to shut it down like Luthor did a few years back.” Kent doesn’t have nice things to say about the tycoon’s newest venture into journalism, the Luthor Log (luthorlog.com), a news website with an ultraconservative bent. Luthor doesn’t pay his contributors, and recently he’s been linked to the disappearance of political columnist Bonnie Barker, who allegedly demanded payment from him last summer, then moved to Canada in disgust. None of her family or colleagues has heard from her since.

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