Little Pink Slips by Sally Koslow

drop.
    Magnolia dumped the newspapers in the recycling bin near her back
    door. By the end of the week, the weeklies—not just celebrity-studded
    periodicals but newsmagazines as well—would also feature the Bebe
    takeover. Then there would be the online newsletters, and e-mail blasts that each editor received, and they all received plenty— Mediaweek, Iwantmedia, Media Life, Media Industry Newsletter, Media This, and Media That. Since the media loves no subject more than itself, it would be a festival of narcissism.
       The worst part was that thanks to Google, her misfortune would live on for years. According to Magnolia's unofficial tally, venerable had already been used nineteen times to describe Lady, causing Magnolia to refresh her understanding of the term. "Commanding respect by
    virtue of age, dignity, character, or position" was the dictionary defini
    tion. Magnolia suspected no one associated venerability with dignity,
    character, or position—the common understanding linked venerability
    simply to old age. The word smelled decrepit. Industry insiders who'd never bothered to study Lady (it was an open secret that most decisionmakers were "too busy to read") would believe the news and assume that Lady w as a dentured, bunioned, whiskered old hag. This pained Magnolia almost more than the fact that she'd effectively be reporting
    to Bebe Blake, a fact she hadn't got her head around yet.
    Hurt didn't begin to describe how she felt. Sick was more like it,
    too sick to eat or talk or even call her parents. But she couldn't waste
    time now being hurt or sick or humiliated. She needed to focus.
    The most frustrating aspect of this avalanche of reality was that it
    was out of the question for Magnolia to tell her side of the story to
    anyone but her nearest and dearest—who, over the last day, failed
    to include Harry, who hadn't even e-mailed. One thing Scary did
    exceedingly well was to control its press coverage. Elizabeth Lester
    Duvall, their storm trooper of corporate communications, monitored
    every sound bite an employee might want to shout out. She delivered
    her gag order in person the previous day the moment Magnolia left
    Jock's office.
    Elizabeth pulled Magnolia into the executive-floor conference room
    and shut the door. "Don't worry, honey," Elizabeth said in the rat-a-tat-tat speech
    which almost belied her Mississippi Delta roots. "We'll handle this.
    Bebe will give a press conference tomorrow afternoon. We've booked
    the Pierre. Be sure to get your hair blown out, because we're giving Entertainment Tonight an exclusive."
    "We'll have makeup at the ready," Elizabeth continued, breath
    lessly. "Back to the press conference. You won't speak. Darlene and
    Bebe will handle the particulars. Just go home. Have a cocktail!"
    She gave Magnolia a big grin and patted her hand. "You're taking
    this so well!" With that, Elizabeth was off. A kiwi green cashmere
    cardigan knotted around her shoulders billowed in her wake and her
    silver hair sparkled under the hallway's fluorescent lights.
    It wasn't until after Elizabeth had left that Magnolia realized,
    when she talked to Jock, her title had never come up. Perhaps Bebe
    would get the "chief " and Magnolia would be downshifted to "edi
    tor," "deputy editor," "executive editor," or the truly opaque "edito
    rial consultant." Or maybe she'd remain "editor in chief," and Bebe
    would become, what, "editorial director"?
    Did it matter, really?
    It did. An editor in chief was far more glorious than a plain-Jane
    editor, and usually got better pay. When a company wanted to be
    cheap, they'd promote an executive editor into the top job, and name
    her "editor" with a token raise. But it was all very confusing. An "edi
    tor" at one company might be paid four times the salary of an "editor
    in chief " at another, and even at the same company, people with
    seemingly identical positions had widely variable power, perks, access
    to upper management, and compensation. Magnolia