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 to 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 great, 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. In the end, 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 ambitious 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.
As the season progresses, the stories do get more ambitious, and major errors—of reporting practice or of mere conscience—are generally avoided. But for all Ned’s professed idealism he’s hardly a role model. His jubilation that a serial killer might be loose in town is a familiar, and perhaps accurate, journalistic trope—bad for the world; good for the media—but not one that reflects well on the profession. Truth Teller reporters repeatedly go undercover to nail down relatively trivial scoops, appearing, in the process, to flagrantly violate the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical guidelines. Even the paper’s biggest triumph—which, without giving too much away, brings it into direct conflict with its toilet-paper stablemate—involves a farcically immoral compromise that tramples the church-state divide between news and product sales (and, worse, isn’t all that funny). When awards season rolls around, and the Truth Teller is in the running, it hardly feels earned.
The show nonetheless succeeds in establishing a sense of nostalgia for the idea of the newspaper—not 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 “kind of alchemy.” In the beginning of the second episode, Ned stresses over filling the space in his inaugural issue. (His letter from the editor, headlined “No News Is Good News,” quotes at length from Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty”—a 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’t 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—Ned points out that a homeless person might use a newspaper for warmth, adding, “You can’t wrap yourself in a blog”—but the joke, I think, gestures at a serious point. “The Paper” ’s 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—but they’re ubiquitous.
Or, at least, they were 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, “The Paper” came out a week after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution 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’s digital strength—far from a given in an industry that has struggled to convert print subscribers into paying online readers at scale. “Many more people engage with our digital platforms and products today than with our print edition, and that shift is only accelerating,” Morse wrote to readers. “For 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.”
All that said, print isn’t dead yet. Rick Edmonds, an analyst at the Poynter Institute, wrote last week that he doesn’t expect a “stampede” of competitors to follow in the Journal-Constitution’s 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’s 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 was that it felt like a tangible achievement. Since then, I’ve developed (and sometimes written about) a fascination with the physical mechanics of the newspaper business—an often hidden world of clunking machines, logistical hurdles, and (occasionally dangerous) manual labor. Watching “The Paper,” I thought of something that the author Nicholas Basbanes told me 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. “Y’know,” he said, “toilet paper is a booming business.”
I spoke with Basbanes because he had written a book 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 “The Office,” 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 “The Paper” 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’s ultimate ambivalence about its content. “Print is permanent,” Ned says at the beginning of the second episode. “It’s like true love.” Romantics like me can cling to the hope that it’s permanent, anyway. As I watched, something that Morse, of the Journal-Constitution, said last week also stuck with me. “I love print,” he told the New York Times, “but I love journalism more.” ♦
