“The Paper” and the State of Local Journalism
For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay
Caspian Kang.
Early on in “The Paper,” 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
too the institution’s 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’s clear that the
Truth Teller
is in much worse shape. Its staff is tiny,and shares a floor with Softees,a
toilet-paper brand-and a more lucrative enterprise-owned by the same parent
company,Enervate. mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), the compositor who puts the
newspaper together, pulls mind-numbing stories from a newswire. (“Elizabeth
Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Routine”; “UV nail lamps cause hand
Melanoma but not with these 12 tricks.”) “Enervate sells products made out
of paper,” an executive named Ken (played by the excellent British comedian
Tim Key) says. “That might be office supplies, that might be janitorial
paper-which is toilet tissue, toilet-seat protectors-and local newspapers.
And that is in order of quality.”
Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the
truth Teller‘s peppy new editor-in-chief. He studied journalism in
college but then decided to take safer jobs selling high-end cardboard, for
his father’s company, and toilet paper, for enervate, and is only now
stepping into the news business. “When I was a kid, I didn’t wanna be
Superman,” Ned says. “I wanted to be Clark Kent, ’cause to me Clark is the
real superhero.He’s saving the world, too, by working at a newspaper.” Ned
intends to revive the
Truth Teller
by hiring new people to do original reporting around town and cutting the
“garbage clickbait nonsense.” Ken gives him short shrift. “Enervate is Tom
Brady,” he says. “very healthy, very rich.The
Truth Teller
is a sick mouse hiding behind Tom Brady’s fridge. Now, Tom Brady, he likes
mice. But this mouse is fucked.” Ned has to make do with the staff that he
already has.
“The Paper” is set in the same universe as the U.S.version of “The
Office,” but,as my colleague Inkoo Kang
suggested in her review
of the show this week, it might have more in common with “Parks and
Recreation,” 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-zombified by unscrupulous owners who come in and
cut the journalism to the bone. “The Paper” shines a light on “people who
have been a little bit beaten down,”
he told
The Wrap. “It just seemed like the mission is so grate, and it’s
such a thing for the characters to be inspired by somebody who comes in and
says, ‘Let’s really do this and do it like it used to be done.’ ” Alex
Edelman, a writer on the show who also plays Adam, a dopey accountant,
described it
more pithily, to the
Boston Globe
as “a love letter to local newspapers.”
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. the
comedic payoff often comes from the fact that the
Truth Teller’s
work isn’t very good-a 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 “The Paper” fails as “a love letter to local
newspapers.” It is one of those, in a surprisingly literal sense.
I got
my first major byline
in 2017,in what might be America’s oldest continuously published
newspaper,the Hartford
Courant. The story, an investigation focussed on people who had won
Connecticut’s 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’
doors. It was the sort of enterprising swing that local newspapers ought to
take.Some still do.But these days many local papers, like the pre-Ned
Truth Teller
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
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.
In “The Paper,” 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-Ned
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 “lame.” This is far from the only time
that the
Truth Teller‘s
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.
