The newsroom’s get-together was stated to be “a social gathering for employees under 30,” which meant we were, at the very least, spared from interacting with annoying older men.
“I hear she started kissing up to the producer, like ‘I wanna be in it too!’”
“Oof. No way.”
“Well, she’s probably under pressure, since one of her peers just got engaged to a pro baseball player.”
“How the tables have turned, am I right? Before that, she totally looked down on her for only ever doing radio work.”
But of course, it was still just as vapid as any other get-together—gossiping about other people in the industry, trading horror stories about sexual harassment from toxic directors, criticizing each other, all that boring crap. Still, I was professionally obligated to stay for at least half of it.
“Awww, if that’s all it takes to be a regular, then put me on too! I wanna be on The News!”
“Not happening, sorry!” Tatsuki pushed his female peer’s face out of his personal bubble—a surprisingly coldhearted move, coming from him. “Go ask Shitara-san or Asou-san, not me.”
“Okay! But really, though, your show doesn’t have enough women in it.”
“What about the meteorologist?”
“She only gets, like, five minutes at the end!”
It was mostly Asou’s preference that we had no regular female commentator, and for a very simple reason: “If we could find one who can speak properly, we’d use her, but none of our options are good enough.” Evidently, he wasn’t interested in a pretty face who could only nod and smile.
“If we wanna give the viewers something cute to look at, we’ll get a studio cat. Y’know, like Station Master Tama, except a kitty producer. It could work, am I right?”
Despite Tatsuki implying she was less valuable than a cat, the woman merely pouted. “You might be in trouble soon, you know. Newsment seems like a wild, fun show. This week, I think I heard they got up to 15 percent. Really seems like they’re going places.”
“Yeah, but our numbers haven’t gone down.”
Oh my god, shut up! “It seems they’ve taken a small number of viewers from every station,” I cut in gently. “Though it’s hard to predict where they’ll be six months or a year from now.”
“Well, they might have good numbers, but I heard their studio presence is still kind of iffy,” someone else added.
“Wait, what? Is there drama between the hosts or what?”
“No, it’s all behind the scenes. The executive producer is from the production team, which is why the tone’s so casual, but it rubs a lot of people the wrong way on the news side of things. From their perspective, they don’t want comedy to get in the way of reporting, but they can’t complain, since it brings in the views.”
“Oh, man, I can totally see that. Jipang’s news crew has always struck me as high-and-mighty.”
“Apparently, their beef with the production team goes waaay back. Meanwhile, production’s like ‘You guys waste our budget with your snooty, self-important reporting and it doesn’t even bring in views.’ So this show is like a compromise between the two where the production team gets a chance to strike back, I guess?”
“Very interesting,” said a voice directly behind me. And when I turned around, I saw the same face I’d seen on TV peering at us over the divider between the izakaya tables.