What Comes Next

THE EVENING OF OPENING DAY is always the strangest part. The crowd has gone home. The ceremony is over. The bunting is down. The scaffolding that was there for the last six months, and that you had stopped seeing because scaffolding becomes invisible once it’s been there long enough, is already gone too, taken down in the last week before the opening. And you are left with the thing itself. The factory. The town. The internet. Whatever it is and will be.

Rod Black, editor of this newspaper, which he has been running for approximately nine hours by the time this reporter catches up with him late Thursday afternoon, is in his office on the third floor of the Tribune building, which is on Main Street, half a block from the town square. His office is the size of an argument, which feels appropriate for a newspaper editor. It has a window that faces the square. He is looking out of it when she arrives.

“Good day?” she asks.

“Seven column inches,” he says, which is not, in Rod Black’s vocabulary, ambivalent. Seven column inches, she has been told by people who know him, is how much he allows for genuine good feeling. Eight is reserved for extraordinary days. Nine was a one-time thing, after a specific sporting event he declines to specify. Ten has never happened.

“Seven,” she says. “Is that good?”

“It’s good,” he says. “Don’t push it.”

Rod Black has been a newspaper editor for thirty-one years. He started at a weekly in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, covering school board meetings and high school sports and the occasional spectacular thing — a barn fire, a missing child found safe, a selectman who turned out to have a second family in Eau Claire. He has worked at six papers in four states and has ended up here, at a paper that has not existed until today, in a town that has not existed until today, on the internet, of all places.

“You know why I’m here?” he said, last week, in an interview for this story. “Because newspapers matter. Because local news matters. Because the thing that made the old internet good, when it was good, was that it was full of people saying specific things about specific places. And the thing that made it go bad, or one of the things, was that the specific things got crowded out by the general things. The algorithmic things. The viral things. The things that got attention everywhere but meant something nowhere.” He paused. “I want to be somewhere that means something specific. Even if that somewhere is on the internet.”

He has hired twelve people for the Tribune’s inaugural staff, a number he describes as “criminally lean but right for the first issue.” He has a beat reporters, a sports desk (“one man and a camera, which is how Grantland Rice started, more or less”), a gossip columnist, a lifestyle section, an editorial page, and a comics section that he is “not going to editorialize about but have strong feelings regarding which I will communicate through my column.” He has also commissioned a crossword puzzle, a horoscope, and a TV listings grid, “because a newspaper without a TV grid is a pamphlet.”

What he cares most about, by his own telling, is the same thing every local newspaper editor has always cared most about: the community. The town. The people in it and the things that happen to them. The school board. The police blotter. The sports scores and the church notes and the obituaries — especially the obituaries, which he calls “the most important journalism in any newspaper” because “an obit is the one story where you can’t get the facts wrong and the human being is the entire point.”

“This town doesn’t have a name yet,” he said. “But it will. And when it does, I want a newspaper that has been covering it from the beginning. That has the records. That has the stories. That knows where the bodies are buried — figuratively, though I expect eventually also literally, because every town eventually gets a cemetery and I intend to cover it.”

He turned from the window.

“That’s what a newspaper is,” he said. “It’s the memory of a place. Long as we publish, the place is remembered.”

Part VIII: The Future, Which Begins Tomorrow

The plans for what this town will become — the things the founding team has shared in conversation, the things Mayor Voss mentions with the careful enthusiasm of a man who has learned to manage expectations without reducing them — are the kind of plans that require time and money and good luck and the sustained commitment of people who may, in the months and years ahead, discover that building something new is harder than deciding to build something new.

The factory will eventually produce, the company says, not just models for individual clients but platforms: tools for other builders, frameworks for other towns, technologies that can carry the values of this town into contexts the founders have not yet imagined. The town itself will grow: more housing, more businesses, a school, a proper hospital, eventually a full-size civic center to replace the current structure, which is, Alderman Przybylski noted at Thursday’s council meeting, “fine for hockey but won’t do for a proper opera.” Whether the opera will come remains an open question. The hockey starts tomorrow.

The town-naming contest, sponsored by this newspaper, closes at midnight on Friday and the winner will be announced in the next edition. The Tribune’s entry form appears on page A1 and below in this article. The mayor’s office has said it will honor the contest result, “provided the name is something we can put on a road sign without embarrassment,” a standard that Voss acknowledged “may require some editorial judgment on our end.” Rod Black said he will exercise that judgment in column inches.

The internet, which has not been dead, exactly, but which has for some years felt like a thing that was very much itself and not quite what it once promised to be — the internet, in this specific corner of it, at this specific latitude, in this brick building beside this Great Lakes water — is, as of this morning, open for business.

Come back often. Tell your friends. Tell your kids. Tell your parents. Tell everyone you know who has ever sat down in front of a screen and felt, briefly, that they were somewhere real and among people who were real and that the thing they were part of was worth being part of.

Tell them the internet lives.

Because it does.

It does.

Karen Wierzbicki is the managing editor of The Internet Tribune. She can be reached at [email protected]. Additional reporting by Dale Przybylski Jr. and Phil Hafner. Keep visiting http://www.theinternetlives.net for the latest from your hometown newspaper on the internet.