THE SCOOP

With print journalism collapsing, a spirited young editor gets laid off from her cushy magazine job and finds herself slumming at a sleazy, National Enquirer-like website.

Francesca Miller, 29, is at a low ebb—after losing her position as features editor of Marie Claire, she can’t find work. She just broke up with her unfaithful boyfriend and is fast running out of cash. Her best friend, Audrey, sympathizes; but Audrey is rich and well-connected, and after losing her job, she lands at the New York Times. Then Frankie learns of an opportunity—night editor at a down-and-dirty online tabloid owned by Johnson News, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Murdoch media empire. Desperate, Frankie signs on to The Scoop. It’s only temporary, she tells herself, because the editor-in-chief, David Brown, has promised that if she does well, she’ll be transferred to the company’s respected, Wall Street Journal–like newspaper, Business Day. (Hard to believe the savvy Frankie would fall for such a ploy, but never mind.) This debut novel—the title echoing Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 journalism satire, Scoop—is clever and fun, at least at first. The Australian-born author, a self-described “former journalist,” clearly knows the terrain; she delivers spot-on descriptions of tabloid excess (“a celebrity nip-slip on the red carpet was our equivalent of war breaking out in Europe”) and the travails of unemployed journos. But once Frankie gets entrenched at The Scoop—struggling to impress David with her scurrilous “scoops”—things take a turn. Frankie will seemingly stop at nothing to get the goods on 1990s pop-rock icon Amanda Myles. But Frankie’s involvement with Amanda deepens, and she begins to see, with increasing horror, the damage her tell-all stories are inflicting. As the novel veers from satire to melodrama—with some anti-press moralizing thrown in—it loses its spark.

A well-written, au courant first novel that takes itself a bit too seriously.