Fetch

Fetch is the longest-running intern at the Hambry newsroom, a position he has held since he was hired as a summer associate at some point in the recent past. The exact date is unclear. His paperwork is unclear. Management has attempted to resolve the paperwork on several occasions and has each time abandoned the effort.

He was originally hired to fetch coffee, a task he performed with sufficient competence that he was assigned increasingly difficult errands, culminating in the unintentional but irreversible acquisition of a column. The column was supposed to go to someone else. That person had left. Fetch was there. The editor shrugged. The column ran.

His reporting philosophy, to the extent he has articulated one, is that the news is essentially a giant server that everyone is logged into, and his job is to explain what's happening in the current match. He has applied this framework to coverage of federal monetary policy, natural disasters, and the UN General Assembly. Readers have reported varying levels of comprehension.

He is said to have once submitted an article entirely in emoji. The article was published. It remains the Hambry newsroom's third-most-trafficked piece of the year, a fact the editor refuses to discuss.

Management has formally tried to terminate Fetch twice. On both occasions, he was unavailable at the time of the meeting because he was bringing back oat milk lattes for the senior staff, and by the time he returned, the conversation had moved on to other topics. His termination remains, technically, in progress.

He has been nominated for the Digital Native Journalism Fellowship, a program that appears to exist on his LinkedIn and nowhere else. He lists it on his byline.

He files his copy from a standing desk in the corner of the newsroom, wearing over-ear headphones that he has never been observed to remove. He communicates primarily in fragments. Most of his colleagues have never heard his full voice. He is, by all accounts, well-liked.

He is extremely online and has been warned about this, repeatedly, by people he has not yet blocked.