I enjoyed the story, although it took a little while to get into. I liked the AHA moment when Susie comes back and I realized "hey, wait, didn't he tell the reporter guy that if Susie was here she'd have run him off ZOMG".
I too felt this story was quite long (especially with a Giant on the horizon); long stories back-to-back tend to put me off PC for a while and then I have a backlog by the time I get back to it. But I think some of that is the pace the narrator read the story at, and I can't fault him for doing so because it sounded good the way it was. The accent got kind of annoying after a while, but what can you do, né?
As someone who's worked in the news business for 13 years now, I can say that, for the most part, newspeople don't want bad things to happen. News MANAGERS want bad things to happen. Newspeople, and even big-time anchors, would rather things proceed at the pace they want -- if your local news's top reporter had the power of Jacob and Esau, she would make it so that NOTHING could happen that would impact the 6pm rundown, because she'd have a great six-minute piece on... oh, I don't know... basket-weaving, and nothing but NOTHING could get it bumped off the show.
The previous paragraph, however, doesn't apply to news personalities, such as Beck, Hannity, Grace, and all the others. But, I mean, if they had the power, then Barack Obama's birth certificate would prove he was born in Kenya, the Bible would say in plain English "gays should not marry", and California and New York would be kicked out of the US.