Week one: I filed my first story on Wednesday and spent Thursday waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. I read a city budget document for the pleasure of understanding it. That was the week I realized how addicted I was to the sensation of filing. Week six: a source wrote back to a question I had asked in January. In the old job, that thread would have been dead, superseded by forty other threads. Here, the answer changed the story's ending. I rewrote three paragraphs and felt, for the first time in years, the specific joy of being wrong in private. Week twenty: a reader sent a letter — paper, stamp, the whole ceremony — about a story I had forgotten I wrote. She had kept the issue. It was sitting on her kitchen table, annotated in pencil. I have never once seen a screenshot annotated in pencil. Slow newsroom, so far: one story a week, ninety percent of my mail answered, and a notebook that is finally full of the things I actually learned rather than the things I was about to file. It is not scalable. That is the point of it.