“Everyone in this library is insane,” I muttered after glancing around at the myriad of laptops, tablets, and phones all sitting on the same waiting screen. 

“Why’s that?” Lottie mumbled from beside me. Lottie and I sat next to each other on our first day of university, and, after realising how much we had in common—both loved 90s romcoms; were unable to understand the obsession with TikTok, but did, albeit, have accounts; believed peas were once invented as a torture device and now humankind has somehow crafted a rhetoric that they are ‘good for you’; and both were aspiring journalists—we were quick to become best friends.

Though as I turned to her to explain, I started to wonder why we were friends at all. “Oh my gosh. You too?”

“Me too, what?” she replied, her mane of blonde ringlets bouncing as she finally looked at me. Yet after seeing my shocked expression, she then glanced around the space, cluing on to what had me so disturbed. “Wouldn’t you say, in this situation, you are the insane one given that you are the only person not trying to buy a ticket?”

“No, I would not. Because who would want to see some over-hyped pop star?”

Her green gaze narrowed before she replied, “Me? Your best friend? I was going to buy you a ticket, too, but it seems—”

“You’d never get me to go see Apollo. Even if you dragged me kicking and screaming, I’d find a way to escape.”

She was shaking her head. “How do you not like him? His music is right up your alley.”

I scoffed. “As if.”

“Frazer Young has even said in interviews that his musical muses are Vance Joy, Dean Lewis, Ruel, Gang of Youths—”

“His voice doesn’t do it for me.”

“How?” she bellowed too loudly, causing us to receive a few annoyed glances from people nearby. “Sorry,” she whispered to them. Turning back to me, she went on, “He has the voice of an angel.”

“A fallen angel, maybe,” I mumbled back. 

Yet she was shaking her head again, muttering to herself about how she didn’t know me anymore, all the while I felt the same.

◁ㅤ ❚❚ ㅤ▷ 

After Lottie scored herself two tickets—stating she’d find a new best friend to take with her—and we wrapped up the essays we were working on for our Media Ethics class, we then forwarded off to our student-led news site meeting.

The team was already in a disarray when we entered, even though we were on time.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, taking in the frantic faces and whispered worried chatter around the room.

“Felicity just told us that the Arts College has decided to shut down our news site,” Jared, our sports journo, filled me in.

“But how will people stay updated about what’s going on on campus?” Lottie rebutted.

Noticing we had arrived, our Editor, Felicity, sighed and joined our conversation. “I’ve already raised that with the Student Union. The university believes their social media pages will be enough to inform students of events. Apparently, our news bulletin barely gets clicks for events, and our actual news, interviews, and feature pieces seem to draw the attention of only the lecturers. They said it’s too costly to run.”

“Oh, so the small fee of funding the website domain is a lot, but erecting another science building isn’t?” I queried.

“You know the Arts is heavily underfunded and STEM is deemed the future so it gets all the money. We’ve been writing about it for the past decade, and nothing ever changes.”

We all shared troubled glances with each other. The truth was, coming from a regional city, we all needed this gig, even if it provided no income. We were unlikely to get any real experience at the local news outlets given there were only a handful and the ones here were too large to take on novices like us. Meaning if we wanted anything to put on our CV, this was it… unless we started our own news website or joined one of those independent online publications that write about games or movies. Though they’d be unlikely to get us far in the industry. The whole point of this publication was the clout that comes with having a university’s name attached to it.

“Did they give a date of when they are shutting us down?” Lottie asked after the news finally sunk in.

“End of the semester. So we have two months to wrap everything up. Of course, this also means that come next year—and the ones following—any classes that require you get your articles published will need to be published elsewhere.”

“This is rubbish,” Jared exclaimed before slumping in his chair.

And he wasn’t wrong. It did put quite the dampener on the meeting. 

“What if,” Lottie then spoke up, “we manage to improve traffic in that time?”

Felicity was shaking her head. “It would be near impossible to turn this around. We’d have to completely revamp our marketing, get multiple good stories… And the reality is, any story worth reporting on is going to be snatched by the bigger outlets. People don’t want to interview with a university—”

“But say we change it. I mean, this is a university for crying out loud. We have people with PhDs in marketing, journalism, and psychology… all that. This is the centre for knowledge. Surely if we pick at the brains of some of these people and maybe get someone in PR on the team we could turn this around and make it a more desirable news outlet… If we managed to improve traffic exponentially, would they reconsider?”

“Well… I’m sure they would. If we can prove it is worth their money and improves the university’s reputation. But it would have to be a significant increase in traffic, and I don’t know how—”

“Well, we just need to start with one good story that goes viral… at least on campus. One that gets people following our news site on social media. Then we need to create more click-bait worthy headlines and continue to get content people will want to read. We need to stop reporting on how energy drinks are dangerous for study habits and that the library is getting an internet speed boost, but instead drag more popular culture into it.”

“Okay,” Felicity nodded. “I hear you. Make it more relevant. But what is the piece you suggest to hook readers? Because nothing goes on in this town that’s worthy of grabbing the attention of—”

“Ah… but we do have something interesting about to happen here, don’t we?” A plotting smile stole Lottie’s face.

And Felicity’s eyebrows knotted in confusion. “What are you—”

“Apollo’s tickets sold out in an hour today, and the whole library was waiting to buy them. All we need to do is score an interview with him, make a spectacle of it, and we might just turn things around.”