If you thought 2020 was a bad year, welcome to 1968.

Report, write, drink. Repeat.

This cycle is the rhythm of newspaper reporter Bud Willis’s life, a familiar but discordant rhythm that leads him from job to job until it eventually lands him in a frigid Yankee backwater working under an editor who’s brilliant but volatile. Willis is both outsider and insider, a Southerner getting the scoop in a Northern state, a chronicler of events but also the one who decides what events to record, and how to record them.

In a time before the internet and cable news, when newspapers were one of the major arteries through which information reached the public, Willis covers everything from town meetings to Vietnam War protests and Robert Kennedy’s assassination.

Before long his insider-outsider status has him caught between a secretive, secluded local commune and the ambitious police chief and state’s attorney who want to bust the commune to further their own careers. And to make matters worse, Seymour, the managing editor Willis has come to admire, is in an all-out war to prevent his newsroom from unionizing.

Notes of a Self-Seeker is the story of a divided, polarized country and the individuals who both disseminate and control the news.