In 2013, The Onion nailed a headline about the newspaper business: “Economically Healthy Daily Planet Now Most Unrealistic Part Of Superman Universe.”
NBC’s new sitcom The Paper, a spinoff of The Office, marries the same kind of gallows humor about the state of community journalism with a well-worn workplace comedy setup. The show is set at The Truth Teller, a faltering small-town daily in Toledo, Ohio. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a college journalism major-turned-salesman who arrives as editor-in-chief, insisting he wants to be “the real superhero, like Clark Kent.” Unlike Superman, however, Sampson has no powers, no cape, and has parachuted into a newsroom that resembles a hospice ward. Truth Teller pages are padded out with fluff about celebrity skincare routines and whatever comes across the AP Wire. At one point, a staffer sums it up flatly: “I’m not sure if it’s even a real paper. It’s local ads and a few articles of clickbait with some sports scores on the cover.”
As a freelance journalist myself, I find The Paper’s laughs more painful than painfully funny because the loss of quality local journalism is an American tragedy. For years, the slow-moving crisis was treated simply as a business problem, characterized by job losses or shuttered buildings, one that could be solved with apps, paywalls, or foundation grants. But as The Paper notes, it’s also a civic story about the disappearance of accountability, the evaporation of civic trust, and — as corny as it sounds — the shared story of a physical place.
Yes, like Ned Sampson, I’m a true believer. For the first several years of my career, I toiled in the newsrooms of small-town central Missouri. In the sneeze-or-you’ll-miss-it farm town of Centralia, Mo., I lost my job after less than a year. One day, I drove to the office to find it locked forever because the owner was tired of losing money in journalism and wanted to focus on a much more profitable endeavor: selling bail bonds.
Later, at The Mexico Ledger in nearby Mexico, Mo. (town slogan: Just A Little North of the Border!), I was the sole full-time reporter, a single set of eyes on an entire community. In Jefferson City, the state capital, I covered crime and courts for the News Tribune. Most of the time, the job was thankless and the pay pitiful, but it still mattered. In Mexico, I helped expose the school district’s shady deal with a for-profit education vendor and a greedy property owner who paid for an astroturfed campaign to bring a controversial Super Walmart to town, despite opposition from local merchants (spoiler alert: Walmart won). One night, after exposing a prominent local figure’s embarrassing brush with petty crime, I found my car keyed in retaliation. It was petty vengeance, but also proof that someone cared enough about what was printed in the paper to lash out. My work, however minor, had made a dent in the local fabric.
Today, in too many towns, that fabric is fraying. Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers in the United States have shut down or been absorbed, according to a Northwestern University study. The closures have only accelerated: in 2022, about two papers closed every week. Of the roughly 6,000 papers left, most are published weekly, not daily. Large swaths of the country now exist in what researchers call “news deserts.” Today, at least 200 counties in America have no local news outlet at all, and more than half have either no paper or only one. Some major cities no longer have a daily newspaper at all.
I witnessed the absurdity of news deserts firsthand while living in Mobile, Ala. There, I uncovered a conspiracy involving a man running for re-election despite having been dead for weeks, and then how political figures colluded for his mother to take his seat so she could vote on a controversial annexation plan. It was the perfect local scoop, bizarre yet consequential. However, Mobile had no daily paper left to publish it, so I ended up running the piece in a magazine based in California, hundreds of miles away from the city whose voters most needed to know about it. The story traveled widely, but the sad fact was that a community had to read about its own corrupt politics in an out-of-state publication.
Even in places that still have papers, the reporters are vanishing. Many papers fall victim to hedge-fund and private-equity owners, whose model often involves selling off real assets or converting them to condos and laying off most of the staff and getting rid of most local reporting to boost cash flow. What remains is a ghost paper, heavily dependent on syndicated national copy and too starved for investigative resources to pay attention to the community.
Such outlets rarely have staff to sit through budget hearings, file records requests through freedom-of-information requests, or conduct in-depth investigations. In The Paper, the clueless managing editor, Esmeralda, brags about her silly long-form piece that reads: “You will not believe how much Ben Affleck tipped his limo driver.” Ironically, this race to the bottom has occurred in the age of information abundance, not drought. Many court filings, city council meetings, and legislative reports are available online with the click of a mouse, but few are paying attention, except for some scattered commentary from social-media influencers or limited coverage provided by television stations.
Years ago, I coined the term pink-slime journalism to describe Journatic, a company I once worked for that secretly outsourced local news to low-paid freelancers overseas, who strung together news releases and website copy into something meant to resemble actual news. Today, the slime has taken on new forms, such as AI-generated copy spun up to pad out hollowed mastheads. In many places, the filler has vanished entirely, leaving nothing but silence.
“Even in places that still have papers, the reporters are vanishing.”
The effects are not abstract. When a local paper disappears, citizens are less likely to vote, those who do vote are more likely to do so in sharply partisan fashion, and local government becomes freer to act without scrutiny. In too many towns, the front page has been replaced by a Facebook group or Nextdoor forums rife with misinformation and unsubstantiated gossip. Meanwhile, cable news and the internet erased old boundaries, nationalizing our sense of attention and flattening all politics into national theater — with people knowing more about what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop than about their own mayor.
It’s no coincidence that while liberals obsess over the corruption emanating from the White House, a thousand mini-Trumps are flourishing in towns and counties across America with little notice. Petty strongmen, grifters, and small-time operators siphon public funds, steer contracts to friends, or intimidate critics — all without the scrutiny that even a half-staffed metro daily once provided. National scandals dominate cable news, while the quiet theft in city-hall chambers is less likely to make a headline.
The link between a lack of local news and municipal corruption is now quantifiable. A Columbia Journalism Review study tracking 65 major dailies that closed between 1996 and 2018 compared districts that lost a paper to those that didn’t. Where newspapers disappeared, federal corruption charges and indictments rose by 7 percent There’s plenty of official misdoings in my current hometown of Harrisburg, Pa., which has been without a dedicated daily paper since 2012. In journalism’s absence, it’s been up to newly elected Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas to personally crusade against corrupt dealings involving his fellow elected county officials, even using phrases like “This is a heist” to call out some of his colleagues who had been siphoning millions of taxpayer dollars into pay-for-play schemes.
More broadly, the collapse of news institutions corrodes civic participation itself. A generation ago, local papers and regional TV affiliates formed the backbone of voters’ information diets. People knew their school-board members and county commissioners because their names and faces appeared in the paper. As local outlets weaken or die, the cycle accelerates: less coverage leads to less civic knowledge, which, in turn, translates to less engagement, making it easier still to cut more reporters. The numbers are dismal. In many cities and counties, turnout in off-year elections has collapsed into single-digit percentages to decide matters such as who sets property tax rates, decides zoning codes, and who fills the pothole — or doesn’t — on your streets. When no one is covering these elections, no one votes in them.
Who’s to blame? Wall Street, as mentioned, bears a share of the blame. Libertarians, meanwhile, gloat about the die-off, insisting that the internet is more efficient than the dinosaurs of old media and the free market will provide a solution, as though TikTok clips and Substacks could replace a city beat reporter with a notepad at the zoning meeting. But the truth is more uncomfortable: we’re all holding the shovel that’s throwing dirt on local journalism’s grave. We’ve collectively chosen entertainment over citizenship, shelling out much more for expensive streaming bundles over three bucks for the paper. Netflix alone now earns roughly twice the revenue of every newspaper in America combined. To paraphrase The Washington Post’s slogan: Democracy dies in distraction — when readers stop showing up to subscribe, to vote, or even to care.
In retrospect, the joke of The Onion’s Daily Planet article has only grown sharper with time. It’s one thing to suspend disbelief about a flying alien from outer space who shoots lasers from his eyes, and it seems like quite another to imagine a metro newsroom in the 21st century where Clark Kent and Lois Lane would be chasing Lex Luthor on the job instead of clickbait. We live in a world that keeps producing new Superman movies while every week newspapers continue to wink out of existence.
That’s what makes the early episodes of The Paper so cutting. In its bumbling editor, recycled wire copy, and crushing sense of apathy, it forces us to confront the fact that the joke of local journalism’s demise is ultimately on all of us.
