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building on Fifteenth Street NW, Jack Yocke had asked to attend the afternoon story conference of editors. At the meeting an editor from each of the paper’s main divisions-metro, national, foreign, sports, style-briefed the lead stories that his staff wanted run in tomorrow’s paper. The Post’s executive or managing editor then picked the stories for the next day’s front page.
    Arranged on the table in front of every chair were stacks of legal-sized papers, “slug” sheets, containing brief paragraphs on each of the top stories for tomorrow’s paper. On weekdays the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, routinely attended Page One meetings. Weekends, Yocke knew, Bradlee would escape to his Maryland west shore hideaway unless his wife, Sally, was throwing a dinner or the Redskins were playing at home.
    Yocke took his seat and studied the slug sheets. The beltway killing yesterday afternoon was in there, as was last night’s “stoop murder.” Both stories had unusual twists. The beftway killing looked like a wire*service story from Los Angeles, the city of rage, yet it had happened here in Washington-Powerville U.s.a.-and the killer had used a rifle. The victim was one Walter P. Harrington, head cashier of Second Potomac Savings and Loan. The neighbors had told Yocke that Harrington was a prig, a martinet, married to an equally offensive wife, yet for all of that respected as an honest, hard-working citizen who kept to himself and never disturbed the neighborhood.
    The stoop murder appeared to be a garden-variety mob rubout, but the victim, Judson Lincoln, apparently had not been associated with the mob in any way. Yocke had spent two hours this morning working the phones and hadn’t heard a hint. Lincoln owned a string of ten checkhing establishments scattered through the poorer sections of downtown D.c. He had been mentioned in stories in the Post at least seven times in the last twelve years, always as a prominent local businessman. Twice the Post had run his photo.
    How would one handle that in a news story? “Judson Lincoln, prominent District businessman who was not a member of any crime family, was professionally assassinated last night on the stoop of his mistress’s town house as the lady looked on. was Great lead!
    Black, honest, respected, sixty-two-year-old Judson Lincoln had enjoyed the company of young women with big tits. If that, was his worst sin he was probably sitting on a cloud strumming a harp right now. Lincoln had just returned from the theater with one such woman when he was gunned down. Had his outraged wife arranged his murder? Jack Yocke was musing on these mysteries when the framed lead press plate mounted on the wall, the Post’s very own trophy, captured his attention. It was Bradlee’s favorite Post front page: Nixoation PmiGN’S.
    Yesterday’s news, Yocke sighed to himself as he surveyed the ranks of the fashionably disheveled men and women taking seats around the table. Most of them were young, in their late twenties or early thirties. These aggressive, mortgaged-to-the-hilt graduates of prestigious colleges had replaced the overweight cigar chompers of yesteryear for whom murders were bigger news than presidential pontifications. Whether the new journalism was better was debatable, but one thing was certain: trendy cost more, a lot more. The new-age journalists of The Washington Postalways three words with the definite article capitalized, intoned the style manual-were paid about twice the real wages of the shiny-pants reporters of the manual typewriter era.
    Some of this new breed dressed like fops-white collars atop striped shirts, with carefully uncoordinated padded coats and pleated trousers. How the old front page-style reporters would have hooted through their broken teeth at these dandies of the nineties!
    And here was their leader, the deputy managing editor, Joseph Yangella, making his entrance. He was nattily dressed, fashionably graying, socially concerned, a man