How to say “paper” about news

In this week’s failure line column, Jon Allsop is filling out for Jay Caspian Kang.

Early in the “paper”, a new peacock simulation series, followed by Truth tellerIt is a fictional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, where viewers showed grainy flashbacks to the institution’s heyday in 1971: the newsroom booming, publishers boasting about its Foreign Bureau and recent stories, one-third of the city council was indicted. Today, it’s obvious Truth teller The situation is much worse. It has small staff and shares floors with Softees owned by the same parent company Enervate (the toilet paper brand and more profitable businesses). Composer Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), who puts the newspaper together, draws awesome stories from Newsweek. (“Elizabeth Olsen reveals her nighttime skin habits”; “UV nail lamps can cause melanoma, but there are no 12 tips.”) “Enervate sells products made of paper,” said an executive named Ken (played by excellent British comedian Tim Key). “It could be office supplies, it could be toilet paper (toilet tissues, toilet seat protectors) and local newspapers. That’s the order of quality.”

Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), Truth tellerThe new editor of Hot Girls. He studied journalism at university but then decided to work in selling high-end cardboard for his father’s company and toilet paper for inclusion in hygiene, and was not involved in the news business until now. “As a kid, I didn’t want to be Superman,” Ned said. “I wanted to be Clark Kent because to me, Clark was a real superhero. He also saved the world by working in newspapers.” NED intends to revive Truth teller By hiring new friends to do original reports around town and cut “trash bait nonsense.” Ken gave him a brief smile. “The one who is keen is Tom Brady,” he said. “Very healthy, very rich. Truth teller It was a sick mouse hidden behind Tom Brady’s refrigerator. Now, Tom Brady, he likes rats. But the mouse was intercourse. ”Ned had to do it with the employees he already has.

“Paper” is set in the same universe as the American version of “Office”, but, when my colleague Inkoo Kang Proposal in her comment It may have more in common with Parks and Recreation during this week’s show, which also revolves around the civic missions of the local Indiana park department’s civic missions. Greg Daniels, who co-created all three shows, said the newsroom environment was attractive because newspapers played a vital democratic role, but were replaced by immoral owners who came in and cut journalism off their bones in an increasingly terrifying strait. “Paper” illuminates “the people who were beaten” He told pack. “It seems so good, and the character’s inspiration is by coming in and saying, ‘It’s a thing to inspire people who really do this, just like it did before.” Alex Edelman, the writer of the show, also played Adam Describe it Arrived more cleverly Boston GlobalAs a “love letter to local newspapers”.

Sure enough, the show touches on many challenges facing local journalism: corporate integration, the rise of individual content creators, the tyranny of the online comment section. Finally, the rewards of comedy usually come from the fact that. Truth teller’s The job isn’t great – if the show does crave the value of a tenacious moral responsibility report, then it’s a weird bait and switch. However, this does not mean that “paper” is “a love letter to the local newspaper”. It is one of them literally.

I got it My first major sub-line In 2017, the oldest ever published newspaper in the United States, Hartford Currant. The investigation of this story focuses on the frequency of impossible people who win Connecticut state lottery, starting with a journalism program I developed with two experienced journalism journalists. It’s a heavy lifting that involves parsing a clumsy dataset, searching for court records, and driving for a few days of knocking. This is the ambitious swing that local newspapers should take. Some still do so. But nowadays, many local newspapers, such as pre-registration Truth tellerstuffed with copy of wires, and in the past two decades, the United States has lost more than a third of newspapers, according to data from the Northwest. In 2020 Currant Close its physical office; the following year, it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a financial company, whose name is synonymous with the press to reduce costs.

In “paper”, just like in real life, local newsrooms still have the ability to do powerful work. In one scene, Ned has a video call with a paper-rich editor in Cincinnati, who is coded as a terrible competency. But the call is intended to emphasize the Truth teller– He accepted it when wearing a peeling blue mask as part of the product review mission within the newsroom, the news brand that his Cincinnati counterpart sees as a “la-foot” news. This is the only time Truth tellerThe crumbling standard of ridicule is for laughter. In the second episode, when Ned asked his novice staff if he had any experience in writing newspapers, someone answered that he wrote some tweets. They then carried out catastrophic reporting missions that led to accidents, arrests and fanatical fictional stories about people pretending to be dogs.