The fast-talking, ever-efficient assistant city editor. Charlie's the one who can pull and deliver your newspaper clips. He's got a story on every page, a contact in every borough, and knows just where to point you to get the full scoop. Always has a pencil behind their ear and a slightly overwhelmed but competent energy.
The grizzled, wise old editor who knows every major historian's work about Hitler and Nazi Germany. She can tell you their major arguments with one another, and how their work all fits together—or doesn't. Smokes a pipe, drinks bourbon from a desk drawer flask, and speaks in aphorisms about how the game has changed.
A sharp, analytical type who is constantly swapping out different pairs of spectacles (monocle for intellectual history, bifocals for social, etc.). Each school of history draws from a different set of archival sources and tells a different story. They help you see the past from every angle. "It's all in how you look at it, see?"
Like the noir character who knows how to get things done—whether it's dropping a criminal charge or uncovering a hidden archive. He's your guide to the gritty "how-to" of research. "You need sources? I know a guy. You need questions? I got a list."
Carey will help you read deeply into the work of the news, so that we put aside "our received views of what journalism is and examine it afresh as a cultural form, a literary act, parallel to the novel, the essay and the scientific report." He sees media not as apart from human consciousness, reflecting ourselves back to us, but as the very core of who we are. He sees meaning in every headline and turn of phrase.
Nord admires her friend and mentor Carey, but has a bone to pick with him. She's a tough, investigative reporter who's all business, and she can't help seeing Carey as naive. Sure, everyone in the newsroom is bound together by webs of meaning, but those webs are spun by powerful interests. She follows the money and the power. Cynical, relentless, and armed with a ledger book and a list of names of everyone who sits in city hall and the media board rooms and pulls the strings.
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