I worked at Element Digital Media Group on a special project that ultimate failed. There was a local newspaper that was struggling, and we were trying to help them go online. The paper was based out of Fremont, and was called The Fremont Flair. We considered to be an altruistic project, and did the work more or less for free. They even wrote up a story about us in the Mercury News. Of course nobody was there to write the story when the whole thing died.

I'd been at the company for a little over a year at the time, and they assigned me the position of head researcher on the project team. This meant driving over to the press where they had been making the Flair for sixty years, or so they told me. This was even before the city of Fremont was even a real place. At first it was just called The Flair. The alliteration was a peculiar coincidence, then.

Most of the time when I went there I worked with a fellow named Holt who was only a little older than me but who knew the history of the town and the paper better than anyone else there, or at least that's what he claimed. "Some of the older guys around here, they make up stories, " he told me when we first met in his office. "They think they remember how things used to be. But it's all imaginary. They'll make something up and swear to you up and down that it's true."

"We don't want to get too much into the nostalgia thing, though, " I said. "I mean, I know they put you in charge of this project on your end for a reason. But we don't want to present your paper as a relic that we're preserving online."

"But we do want to keep our core customers with us, " Holt said. "And for that we'll need continuity. We'll need to tell them that there's a connection between now and the past."

"Of course, " I said. "We developed this strategy together, I believe. Your team and ours."

"I wasn't part of the initial planning, " Holt said. "They brought me on later."

"The same thing happened to me, " I said. "I'm a writer most of the time. I'm not a designer."

"Should I take that as a sign that Element isn't taking this seriously?" Holt asked me.

"I wanted to be a part of this, " I said. "I asked. I didn't know they'd make me head of research, but I wanted to play a role."

Holt took me for a drive around Fremont the day we first met, and pointed out all of the corners where they had boxes where you could get the Flair. "I suppose we'll be getting rid all of them, " he said to me.

"We'll keep them around and put up notices, " I said. "It'll be an easy way to advertise the change."

We turned the corner from a commercial street to a little residential road. I don't remember the names of these places. Fremont isn't a place I visit often. "There was a story we did right here, " he said, pointing to a house near the intersection. "It was a hostage situation. The typical sort of thing. An angry boyfriend and some kids that everyone was worried about. We thought the television people from San Jose or Oakland would come out, but nobody did. It went unreported outside our little area."

"I hope it ended well, " I said.

"The police stormed the place, " he told me. "So it was quite the scene. There was nothing going on that we could see for maybe twenty minutes. And then they drag this guy out in handcuffs. He was screaming at all of us like you wouldn't believe. One of the kids was hurt a bit in the scuffle, but he was fine in the end."

"A typical story, like you said, " I said.

"We ran out of copies the day we ran that story, " he said. "Our boxes were empty."

"That's what people like, " I told him.

We went around a big park and then through the old-looking part of Niles. "I know this area, " I think.

"Many people do, if they know anything about Fremont, " Holt said.

"My wife and I ate out here once, " I told him. "I can't remember the name of the place. But that was years ago."

"The wife is gone, I take it, " Holt said. "Given your tone of voice."

"We get along okay now, " I said. "But yes, she's gone."

I looked out at all the quaint little shops and bistros. "We'll want to put more photographs into the new issue, " I told him. "This is something that we can take advantage of with the online format."

"I thought you were a writer, " Holt said.

"I'm telling you the plan here, " I said. "I won't be writing for this project, anyway."

We turned around and headed back towards the main part of the city. "So how long had you been married for?" Holt asked me.

"A few years, " I said. "It was fine until I tried to make it as a real writer. You know, short stories and novels and that sort of thing. That's what killed it."

"That was a bad idea, " Holt said.

"I can see that now, " I told him. "But you know how it is when you're young."

"I had one short novel that I swore was the best thing ever written, " Holt told me. "I'd tweak it day after day like it was a hot rod. I wouldn't leave people alone about it. I told my friends, family, everyone."

"I don't work that way, " I said. "I write and write and forget about whatever I wrote the day before. And I certainly don't tell anyone."

"Not exactly a good way to market yourself, " Holt said.

"I gave it up anyway, more or less, " I said. "I'm talking about the past here."

"You have to sell yourself, " Holt told me.

"Now you sound like my ex-wife, " I said.

"She was right, " Hold said.

"I took it seriously, though, " I told him. "I did finish some stories and send them out to places. But nothing ever came of it."

"It's a business like anything else, " Holt told me. "My story was good. I mean, okay, maybe it wasn't the greatest thing ever written. But it was good enough to print and maybe even become a minor classic. But I could never find a way to fit it into the marketplace. There wasn't any audience for the material. That's the bottom line."

We went down another residential street, full of modest homes from the middle of the last century. "You speak in pretty pragmatic terms for someone who's writing a dying little community newspaper, " I said.

"The Flair is dying, " he said. "I know that. This project probably won't work. What do we expect? That we're going to make a website and people will read the thing like they do when they're sitting on a park bench? I know what's going to happen. That's why I agreed to help out with this."

"But why even care, if the paper doesn't have an audience anymore?" I said. "Because that's what this comes down to."

"I'm only mercenary about my own work, " Holt said. "The stuff I do at the Flair is like a hobby, except that I make a bit of money. Not much money, mind you. But it's a forum where I get to live a fantasy world like yourself, where people read whatever you want them to read."

"I have a regular job myself, " I said. "I'm sure it pays more than yours. So I would say that I'm far removed from any sort of fantasy world."

"But look what you gave up to get there, " Holt told me. "I'm sure you're miserable. I can tell just by talking with you. You feel as if some sort of grave injustice has been committed against you. I've known a lot of people like you. You know, we got a lot of young writers at the paper. And they come in and they'll start telling you about all the grand ideas they have if you just ask them some trifling question about themselves. We would get this in interviews all the time. Some of them we had to let go, because I knew that they would wind up hating themselves if they stuck around. For a while I insisted on being present at every interview, even though I didn't have to be. This became a big issue for me. Basically we wanted to keep people like you out of the business."

Holt was pretty upset by this point and I didn't know what to say. We drove on in silence until we got back to the Flair's offices. We went back to this office and worked out some of the details about when we'd all meet again and what steps we had to take in the meantime. I was going to get up and leave when Holt motioned for me to stay seated.

"I hope you didn't take offence to what I said before, " he said.

"I don't know how you expect me to respond, " I said. "You're the client, so I suppose I should be conciliatory."

"We're both failures, even if we went about it different ways, " Holt said. "It's tough when you're in the presence of another failure. You say certain things."

"I think I understand, " I said.

"It's life, " Holt said. "Things don't work out."

"My wife would have left anyway, " I said. "I don't blame her. I'm not fun to be around most of the time. But we get along great, now that we have this distance between us."

"It's like that sometimes, " Holt said.

"That's what people always tell me, " I said. "They say that we're both better off. And that I'm better off now. They tell me that I'm more relaxed now than I used to be. I don't believe it. But that's what they say."