{"id":876629,"date":"2025-10-10T00:14:58","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T05:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/10\/what-the-paper-has-to-say-about-journalism\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T00:14:58","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T05:14:58","slug":"what-the-paper-has-to-say-about-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/10\/what-the-paper-has-to-say-about-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"What \u201cThe Paper\u201d Has to Say About Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For this week\u2019s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Early on in \u201cThe Paper,\u201d a new Peacock mockumentary series that follows the staff of the Truth Teller<\/em>, a fictional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, viewers are shown a grainy flashback to the institution\u2019s heyday, in 1971: the newsroom is bustling, and the publisher is boasting about its foreign bureaus and a recent story that got a third of the city council indicted on bribery charges. In the present day, it\u2019s clear that the Truth Teller<\/em> is in much worse shape. Its staff is tiny, and shares a floor with Softees, a toilet-paper brand\u2014and a more lucrative enterprise\u2014owned by the same parent company, Enervate. Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), the compositor who puts the newspaper together, pulls mind-numbing stories from a newswire. (\u201cElizabeth Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Routine\u201d; \u201cUV nail lamps cause hand Melanoma but not with these 12 tricks.\u201d) \u201cEnervate sells products made out of paper,\u201d an executive named Ken (played by the excellent British comedian Tim Key) says. \u201cThat might be office supplies, that might be janitorial paper\u2014which is toilet tissue, toilet-seat protectors\u2014and local newspapers. And that is in order of quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the Truth Teller\u2019s<\/em> peppy new editor-in-chief. He studied journalism in college but then decided to take safer jobs selling high-end cardboard, for his father\u2019s company, and toilet paper, for Enervate, and is only now stepping into the news business. \u201cWhen I was a kid, I didn\u2019t wanna be Superman,\u201d Ned says. \u201cI wanted to be Clark Kent, \u2019cause to me Clark is the real superhero. He\u2019s saving the world, too, by working at a newspaper.\u201d Ned intends to revive the Truth Teller<\/em> by hiring new people to do original reporting around town and cutting the \u201cgarbage clickbait nonsense.\u201d Ken gives him short shrift. \u201cEnervate is Tom Brady,\u201d he says. \u201cVery healthy, very rich. The Truth Teller<\/em> is a sick mouse hiding behind Tom Brady\u2019s fridge. Now, Tom Brady, he likes mice. But this mouse is fucked.\u201d Ned has to make do with the staff that he already has.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Paper\u201d is set in the same universe as the U.S. version of \u201cThe Office,\u201d but, as my colleague Inkoo Kang suggested in her review<\/a> of the show this week, it might have more in common with \u201cParks and Recreation,\u201d which also revolves around a cast of eccentrics on a civic mission, in that case within a local parks department, in Indiana. Greg Daniels, who co-created all three shows, has said that the newsroom setting was attractive because newspapers play a vital democratic role but are in increasingly dire straits\u2014zombified by unscrupulous owners who come in and cut the journalism to the bone. \u201cThe Paper\u201d shines a light on \u201cpeople who have been a little bit beaten down,\u201d he told<\/a> The Wrap<\/em>. \u201cIt just seemed like the mission is so great, and it\u2019s such a thing for the characters to be inspired by somebody who comes in and says, \u2018Let\u2019s really do this and do it like it used to be done.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Alex Edelman, a writer on the show who also plays Adam, a dopey accountant, described it<\/a> more pithily, to the Boston Globe<\/em>, as \u201ca love letter to local newspapers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the show touches on many of the challenges facing local journalism: corporate consolidation, the rise of individual content creators, the tyranny of the online comments section. In the end, the comedic payoff often comes from the fact that the Truth Teller\u2019s<\/em> work isn\u2019t very good\u2014a curious bait and switch, if the show truly does aspire to prove the worth of dogged, ethical accountability reporting. This is not to say, though, that \u201cThe Paper\u201d fails as \u201ca love letter to local newspapers.\u201d It is one of those, in a surprisingly literal sense.<\/p>\n

I got my first major byline<\/a> in 2017, in what might be America\u2019s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Hartford Courant<\/em>. The story, an investigation focussed on people who had won Connecticut\u2019s state lottery with improbable frequency, began as a journalism-school project that I went on to develop with two veteran reporters. It was a heavy lift, which involved parsing unwieldy data sets, scouring court records, and driving around for days knocking on subjects\u2019 doors. It was the sort of ambitious swing that local newspapers ought to take. Some still do. But these days many local papers, like the pre-Ned Truth Teller<\/em>, are stuffed with wire copy, and, according to data from Northwestern, the U.S. has lost more than a third of its newspapers altogether in the past two decades. In 2020, the Courant<\/em> closed its physical office; the following year, it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a financial firm whose name is a byword, in journalism circles, for aggressive cost-cutting.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Paper,\u201d as in real life, local newsrooms are still capable of punchy work; in one scene, Ned has a video call with the editor of an Enervate paper in Cincinnati, who is coded as intimidatingly competent. But the call is intended to emphasize a contrast with the Truth Teller<\/em>\u2014Ned takes it while wearing an exfoliating blue face mask as part of a newsroom-wide product-review assignment, a brand of journalism that his Cincinnati counterpart dismisses as \u201clame.\u201d This is far from the only time that the Truth Teller\u2019s<\/em> shaky standards are played for laughs. In the second episode, when Ned asks his neophyte staff whether they have any newspaper-writing experience, one replies that he has written some tweets. They then go out on disastrous reporting assignments that result in, variously, an accident, an arrest, and a made-up story about a supposed craze in which people pretend to be dogs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As the season progresses, the stories do get more ambitious, and major errors\u2014of reporting practice or of mere conscience\u2014are generally avoided. But for all Ned\u2019s professed idealism he\u2019s hardly a role model. His jubilation that a serial killer might be loose in town is a familiar, and perhaps accurate, journalistic trope\u2014bad for the world; good for the media<\/em>\u2014but not one that reflects well on the profession. Truth Teller<\/em> reporters repeatedly go undercover to nail down relatively trivial scoops, appearing, in the process, to flagrantly violate the Society of Professional Journalists\u2019 ethical guidelines<\/a>. Even the paper\u2019s biggest triumph\u2014which, without giving too much away, brings it into direct conflict with its toilet-paper stablemate\u2014involves a farcically immoral compromise that tramples the church-state divide between news and product sales (and, worse, isn\u2019t all that funny). When awards season rolls around, and the Truth Teller<\/em> is in the running, it hardly feels earned.<\/p>\n

The show nonetheless succeeds in establishing a sense of nostalgia for the idea<\/em> of the newspaper\u2014not as a vector of Pulitzer-worthy journalism, necessarily, but as a physical thing. At the end of the first episode, Mare takes Ned into the basement to show him an old printing press, which renders him awestruck; in another flashback, its operation is depicted as a \u201ckind of alchemy.\u201d In the beginning of the second episode, Ned stresses over filling the space in his inaugural issue. (His letter from the editor, headlined \u201cNo News Is Good News,\u201d quotes at length from Elmore Leonard\u2019s \u201cGet Shorty<\/a>\u201d\u2014a funny joke that illuminates the absurdity of having to satisfy a fixed quotient of column inches on deadline.) In the fourth episode, Ned says that he doesn\u2019t feel threatened by a local blogger because, unlike a blog, a newspaper can travel through the world from place to place, being picked up and read by multiple people on its journey. Here, too, the punch line is absurd\u2014Ned points out that a homeless person might use a newspaper for warmth, adding, \u201cYou can\u2019t wrap yourself in a blog\u201d\u2014but the joke, I think, gestures at a serious point. \u201cThe Paper\u201d\u00a0\u2019s title sequence does, too, stitching together old footage of newspapers being used to pack food or collect pet pee. Newspapers might sometimes be trash, it seems to say\u2014but they\u2019re ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

Or, at least, they were<\/em> ubiquitous. Not only have many newspapers disappeared in recent years but many of those left in business have cut down the number of days they print, or stopped producing physical issues altogether, in a context of declining circulation and the inescapability of online news. As fate would have it, \u201cThe Paper\u201d came out a week after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/em> announced that it plans to go digital-only next year, perhaps the most significant example yet of a paper abandoning print entirely. Andrew Morse, the publisher, pitched the transition not as a retrenchment but as a vote of confidence in the paper\u2019s digital strength\u2014far from a given in an industry that has struggled to convert print subscribers into paying online readers at scale. \u201cMany more people engage with our digital platforms and products today than with our print edition, and that shift is only accelerating,\u201d Morse wrote to readers. \u201cFor you, and for us, holding onto the paper can bring a sense of comfort in a world of unrelenting change. But we cannot allow that to hold us back.\u201d<\/p>\n

All that said, print isn\u2019t dead yet. Rick Edmonds, an analyst at the Poynter Institute, wrote last week<\/a> that he doesn\u2019t expect a \u201cstampede\u201d of competitors to follow in the Journal-Constitution\u2019s<\/em> footsteps, since print products, perhaps surprisingly, still contribute significant, if declining, revenues to many news organizations. And, as Morse acknowledged, many readers are still emotionally attached to them. Normally, such readers are assumed to be older. But there\u2019s evidence that some young people are developing a fondness for print media, too, seeing in it a sort of retro chic, as well as an escape from the unlimited attention hole that is the modern internet. Speaking as a millennial, I grew up with a newspaper in the house but, in eight years as a working journalist, have only seen a handful of my own articles make print. Part of the thrill of appearing on the front page of the Courant<\/em> was that it felt like a tangible achievement. Since then, I\u2019ve developed (and sometimes written about) a fascination with the physical mechanics of the newspaper business\u2014an often hidden world of clunking machines, logistical hurdles<\/a>, and (occasionally dangerous<\/a>) manual labor. Watching \u201cThe Paper,\u201d I thought of something that the author Nicholas Basbanes told me<\/a> back in 2018, when I wrote about how tariffs were complicating the supply of the relatively low-grade paper on which newspapers are printed. Smaller U.S. paper mills, Basbanes said, had stopped making it in favor of more remunerative products. \u201cY\u2019know,\u201d he said, \u201ctoilet paper is a booming business.\u201d<\/p>\n

I spoke with Basbanes because he had written a book<\/a> about the millennia-long history of paper as a transformational technology, one that remains with us, both literally and culturally. Paper, of course, is ever-present in \u201cThe Office,\u201d in which the action unfolds at an administrative-supplies company, even if that setting is mostly deployed as a pretext for the types of interaction that might happen in any workplace. As \u201cThe Paper\u201d winds to its conclusion, its setting, too, comes to feel increasingly incidental to the dynamics among the people who work within it, and their various amorous entanglements. But the newspaper itself remains an object of affection, no matter the show\u2019s ultimate ambivalence about its content. \u201cPrint is permanent,\u201d Ned says at the beginning of the second episode. \u201cIt\u2019s like true love.\u201d Romantics like me can cling to the hope that it\u2019s permanent, anyway. As I watched, something that Morse, of the Journal-Constitution<\/em>, said last week also stuck with me. \u201cI love print,\u201d he told<\/a> the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cbut I love journalism more.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this week\u2019s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang. Early on in \u201cThe Paper,\u201d a new Peacock mockumentary series that follows the staff of the Truth Teller, a fictional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, viewers are shown a grainy flashback to the institution\u2019s heyday, in 1971: the newsroom is bustling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":876630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4948,27274],"tags":[42747,17505],"class_list":{"0":"post-876629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the","8":"category-paper","9":"tag-the","10":"tag-paper"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}