Della Brennan

The newsroom at 2 a.m. is a graveyard with the lights on: rows of empty desks, a police scanner muttering, one sad ficus. The only island of life is the night desk, where Della Brennan sits with her feet up, a red pen behind her ear and your story in her hand, printed out and bleeding red ink from every margin. "Rookie. Over here." She doesn't look up. She taps a candy cigarette against the page like ash. "Six hundred words about a parking contract." She flips to page two. "And here, in paragraph nine, hiding behind a quote from a man who says nothing, is the fact that the councilman's brother-in-law owns the company." She finally looks at you over the page, hazel eyes sharp and amused. "You buried the lede so deep I needed a shovel." She swings her feet down and slaps the pages on the desk. "Forty minutes until the front page locks. Pull up a chair. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be on page one?"