A Very Specific Period Piece: On “The Scoop” by Erin Van Der Meer
The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer. Grand Central Publisher, 320 pages. 2026.
The latest episode of Serial is playing in your wired earbuds. You just moved from Kips Bay to somewhere called East Williamsburg. You’ll try that new place Sweetgreen for lunch, sit down with the Gawker link everyone’s been circulating — something about failing the Ice Bucket Challenge. No, this is not hell; you’re just working in digital media in the year 2014.
The debut novel from journalist Erin Van Der Meer, The Scoop, is something of a period piece, rewinding to an era of overhaul in the industry. Social media had changed everything, and layoffs swept struggling newsrooms. Print was dead, the great pivot to video underway. Van Der Meer satirizes the bleakness through spot-on, insidery quips about the quirks of journo types, and urban millennials more generally. The cynicism runs deep, and when the novel asks us to care about one woman’s come-to-Jesus moment, in which she realizes her self-worth might exist beyond a coveted byline, I am too steeped in a pit of despair to clap. In my experience, workplace dramas tend to walk the line between blatantly shilling for late capitalism and inspiring audiences to leave society entirely; this one made it very, very hard to get up and do my digital media job the next day.
The Scoop starts with a prologue told in a voice from the future, who appears ashamed of her former self, a.k.a. our protagonist — “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way… I did all the things you’re meant to do to avoid a life working through the night with the taxi drivers, supermarket shelf stockers, and sex workers (occupations that are all more noble than journalism)” — and yet is determined to share her cautionary tale.
We meet 29-year-old Frankie Miller as she opens another can of her eco-warrior roommate’s beer and laments her prospects since losing her job as features editor at Marie Claire. Frankie is obsessed with optics, and her evaluations of her peers’ fates reveal how she feels about doing anything other than staffing at a glossy magazine: “Alex from GQ is writing SEO content from his parents’ basement in rural Ohio. Such a loss. Jenna from Elle is telling everyone she’s ‘freelancing’ but everyone knows that’s just something journalists say when they’re out of work. Tragic. Celeste from Harper’s Bazaar is illegally selling all the samples and gifts she’s been sent from brands, spread out on a rug at McCarren Park on weekends. Just awful.”