0.15 Reincarnation

After growing up in eastern Washington and graduating from the University of Washington in 1974, Katherine Koberg Possibly the world’s greatest living editor. had gone to New York, taken a job at Newsweek Magazine, put in her time back east as per Seattle tradition, then come back—as per Seattle tradition—in 1983. She went to work for the Weekly , where she proved to have tremendous editorial gifts and a vision for alternative journalism—particularly when it came to arts coverage—that rivaled Brewster’s in both energy and clarity. She also had an aptitude for management—writing budgets, firing under-performers, demanding ever-greater effort from writers, giving direction, setting vision—that is rare in the world of writing, where artistic temperaments and willfully impractical minds predominate. In short order, she became arts editor, then, in 1986, the paper’s managing editor. In the years since, she discovered and developed the Weekly ’s best writers and established the Weekly as the preeminent voice in Seattle arts coverage and criticism. Anyone writing a story of significant length or complexity wanted her as an editor—everything she touched she made better.

By 1996, the Weekly was best known for rigorously crafted cover stories and great arts-and-entertainment coverage—the areas of the paper falling under Koberg’s aegis. I had arranged—largely through screaming and begging—to have her edit both of my books. I still keep among my most treasured possessions manuscript pages decorated with her handwritten comments, my favorite among these being “What could this possibly mean ?”

Koberg was the boss I approached in the wake of reading the Amazon.com ad, and during my short walk from the Weekly ’s Internet lifeline to her office, I underwent a rigorous and pointless self-examination. I thought about the rare opportunity I had been granted to escape the Weekly just as it was falling too far behind the technology boom ever to return to relevance. Seattle was about to be transformed into something the Weekly would never understand, and I had a chance to experience the transformation firsthand. I was convinced that Bezos and I had hit it off and that he must have been so pleased with what I had written about Amazon that the job was mine for the taking. Out of a sense of duty, I wallowed for a while in self-recrimination over the ethical lapse signaled by that fantasy. And mostly I thought about the opportunity I’d missed at Microsoft; here I was now, being handed a second chance, a chance at hitting it rich for life after a few year’s work, if only I had the guts to leap onto the passing freight train bound for glory before it picked up too much speed.

Everything in the office around me looked shabby. Amazon’s offices, in a far more decrepit building than the Weekly ’s trendy refurbished digs, looked somehow more splendid, more alive. Amazon was the future—success, power, prosperity, glamour—and the Weekly was the failed past: complacency lapsing into bewildered nostalgia.