Early on in the pilot of The Paper, the loose-lipped managing editor of The Toledo Truth Teller says the quiet part out loud: “The print version really only exists for people to frame when they are mentioned. Which we try to do as much as possible.” And then there’s a close-up of an entire page filled with a list of names.
I laughed. Then I sighed. My old editor at my first job out of college—as a sportswriter at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Massachusetts—liked to say that most of the time, we were writing articles for parents of teenage athletes to clip out and hang on their refrigerators. He wasn’t trying to destroy anyone’s ego. It was just his way of reminding us of the service we were providing: preserving memories.
Twenty years ago, working for a newspaper still seemed romantic. The first time I walked through the windowless newsroom of the Tribune, I looked up at photos of reporters celebrating the paper’s second Pulitzer Prize and felt pretty proud of myself. I remember having a $27,000 annual salary and somehow feeling like it was enough for a 22-year-old kid.
Now it’s strange seeing the industry I came up in turned into a mockumentary about workplace monotony. And it stings to know that it was chosen for one main reason: because it’s dying.
According to a recent report by Northwestern University’s State of Local News Project, more than one-third of the country’s print newspapers have closed since 2005. As of last year, only 20 percent of the 5,600 still in business were dailies. When I eventually tell my young nieces and nephew about my first job, I’ll also probably have to explain to them what a newspaper was.
The premise of the Office spinoff—a painfully optimistic new editor in chief named Ned, played by Domhnall Gleeson, leads a small team of greenhorns on a quest to resuscitate a hollowed-out Midwest paper—is a noble fantasy. In real life, no one is saving local newspapers. But at the same time, The Paper isn’t exactly make-believe. Because even in a small corner of a rotting institution, the work means something.
What separates The Paper from The Office is that unlike selling paper, making a newspaper isn’t always tedious. A group of journalists, no matter how unserious they are, coming together to put out the paper every day is, as corny as it sounds, a miracle.
For four years in my 20s, I spent most of my waking hours at the paper. While my friends were out at bars on fall Friday nights, I was at football games around greater Boston and southern New Hampshire. Afterward, I’d talk to the players and coaches, scribbling down their quotes on a yellow pad. (Advice for young writers: Use a recorder for your damn interviews. The last thing you want is to be like me, who could barely read his own handwriting. Luckily, the most complex thing anyone usually said was “The offensive line stepped up tonight.”) Then, I’d rush to The Eagle-Tribune’s still bustling office and clack out a game story. Then I’d take more box scores over the phone in between bites of a gloppy roast beef sandwich. It was the aughts, so there was always a Red Sox playoff game on the box TV hanging perilously above us. In October 2007, after Manny Ramirez hit a walk-off home run against the Angels, I was sure that the sound we made was going to knock the TV off the wall and onto our heads.
As midnight approached, my editor would print out the sports pages and hand them out for proofreading. I probably found a grand total of three typos in my four years there, but each time I did, it felt like winning a high-stakes scavenger hunt. If all went well, the adrenaline surge led to us making deadline. And when we did, we’d all exhale and head to Wendy’s. There was no more satisfying reward at 1 a.m. than a spicy chicken sandwich.
Hollywood portrayals of newspapers, understandably, tend not to focus on the routines of hyperlocal journalism. There’s nothing world changing about making deadline. Historical dramas like All the President’s Men, Spotlight, and The Post don’t ignore the minutiae of the work—the endless phone calls, the arguments with editors, the sweat-inducing anxiety—but that’s not what people remember about them.
I get why the Watergate scandal is more fit for film than, say, my old paper’s page designers cursing out their outdated PCs when they seized up. But The Paper, much like its predecessor, sets out to find humor and humanity in the mundane. And so, in the first episode, Chelsea Frei’s character Mare has to stop an interview with the show-within-a-show’s camera crew because her computer freezes as she’s in the middle of laying out the next day’s edition of the Truth Teller.
I felt her pain. Working at a newspaper means having to fight entropy, obsolete technology, shortsighted management, low wages.
And when you have a bad day, you can’t always hide from it. My first year out of school, a reader called my desk. She was livid that the word “excel” was misspelled in a teaser for one of my stories. I didn’t even write the teaser. But after a five-minute browbeating, I lost my patience and blurted out, “We make mistakes. We’re not robots.” A few minutes later, a news editor called me into her office. She’d gotten the same angry phone call. “Did you just call a reader a robot?”
I copped to it and apologized for losing my cool. There was no punishment other than teasing from my coworkers for weeks. I was embarrassed, though. It was a very bad day. But it could always be worse.
A buddy of mine who worked at a community newspaper once got yelled at in a town meeting for accidentally leaving out the letter l in the word “public.” That was his very bad day.
But still not nearly as bad as the day my old colleague, a layout editor, had when he wrote an all-caps, above-the-fold headline that said, “All in the Famuly.” Somehow, he didn’t get fired. Probably because his boss found the whole thing too funny to do anything about it.
Every single newspaper on earth, from major metros to small-town dailies, has one thing in common: characters. They attract know-it-alls, gossips, eccentrics, and people who just like being close to action and power, whether their home base is Washington, D.C., or Walla Walla, Washington.
The Eagle-Tribune—like, I suspect, most local newspapers—was full of people who could’ve been sitcom characters. There was the reporter, at one time a crack appliance salesman on the side, who kept accidentally spelling Godsmack lead singer and local hero Sully Erna’s last name “Erner” because that’s how it’s pronounced with a thick Boston accent. That led to a staffwide cautionary memo. Then there was the Trib’s Hockey Hall of Fame columnist, Russ Conway. He was tight with Bobby Orr, had a mullet, and drove Corvettes. After his Pulitzer Prize–nominated investigative reporting helped take down Alan Eagleson, the crooked head of the NHL Players Association, Sports Illustrated profiled him.
Oh, and our publisher moonlighted as a ventriloquist.
More on the State of Journalism
Naturally, a friend and mentor of mine felt the need to write a script based on his time at the Tribune. It was funny, but the comedy was mostly unintentional. And here’s where I should acknowledge something: I was also a character in this story. Not as a steady Jim Halpert type, but as an anxious, overeager, ass-kissing 20-something in khaki pants and a button-down two sizes too big who desperately wanted to be a pro sports beat writer.
When a local girls high school basketball team made the state final, I went to interview the starting five for a big preview. After answering my boring questions outside the gym, one player walked into the locker room. Before the door closed behind her, she shouted, at the top of her lungs, “Awkward!” From the hallway, I heard her teammates laughing. I couldn’t help but laugh, too.
There were two lessons I learned that day. The first was that I shouldn’t take myself so damn seriously. The second was that I should embrace local sports. I never covered the Patriots or Celtics on a daily basis, but I did get to write long features about high school athletes almost every week. And working on that kind of emotional, inspirational story was more fulfilling than a 300-word sidebar about Ben Watson could ever be. Certainly worth getting owned by a bunch of teenage girls.
Like almost every other American newspaper, The Toledo Truth Teller is a shell of its former self. “Can you believe they used to employ over 1,000 people?” the smarmy Brit Ken Davies, played by Tim Key, says in the pilot. “That’s absolutely insane, if I do say so myself.”
Davies is a strategist for Truth Teller parent company Enervate, a peddler of office supplies, toilet tissue, toilet seat protectors, and … local newspapers. “And that is in order of quality,” he says, clearly unaware that he’s the kind of executive dedicated to maintaining that hierarchy.
When The Eagle-Tribune hired me in the spring of 2005, the paper and its sister publications reportedly had about 700 employees. That June, the family that had owned the company for more than 100 years sold it to Community Newspaper Holdings—a subsidiary, bizarrely, of the state of Alabama’s pension fund—for an estimated $225 million. Even back then, it was a staggering amount of money. In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the newspaper business was at the top of a rickety roller-coaster hill. The plunge was coming. That fall, seeking protection from the conglomerate that had just taken over, some of the best reporters at the Tribune led a union drive. The paper’s leadership, of course, refused to recognize the union. Then the company launched an ugly, monthslong anti-union campaign.
It worked. There was an election, and my colleagues, probably scared of retaliation from the bosses, voted against having a union. Most of the organizing committee eventually got reassigned to lesser beats. CNH claimed otherwise, but it sure looked like they were being punished. One by one, they left the paper.
Within a few years, the company began laying people off. Then they furloughed us. And on the ground, I started noticing things that would’ve been bleakly hilarious if they were plot points on a TV show. In a meeting, a high-ranking editor told us that we needed to stop ordering pizza on big news nights—as if cutting out $200 worth of quarterly Bertucci’s would salvage the paper’s bottom line.
But that wasn’t as funny as the publisher instituting an informal policy he called “10 Percent More.” As in we all needed to give 10 percent more effort to help the paper run better, despite the lack of resources.
If that sounds familiar, you probably watched The Wire. After announcing a round of buyouts in the fifth season premiere, the executive editor of The Baltimore Sun explains to his underlings that they “are, quite simply, going to have to find ways to do more with less.” The name of the episode is, fittingly, “More With Less.”
“That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line,” The Wire creator David Simon told The New Yorker in 2007. “You do less with less.”
At The Eagle-Tribune, most of the rank and file did do 10 percent more. Not because of any moral imperative. But because we had no other choice. As the staff gradually shrank, we all had to chip in to make up for attrition. The long hours and late nights for little pay wore on everyone. On bad days, a friend at the paper used to say something about working there that’s stuck with me ever since: “We don’t make enough money to hate our jobs.”
But the thing was that there were still enough good days to make me forget, at least temporarily, that our industry was in trouble. I’ll never forget watching a high school runner bring the crowd to its feet at a track meet as he was breaking the state record in the mile. And writing a feature about a tough-as-nails basketball coach who happened to be a nun. And spending so much time trying to find local tailgaters to interview at the 2007 AFC championship game that when I finally got up to the press box before kickoff, our Patriots beat writer told me that I smelled like a pile of charcoal briquettes.
Over the years, I’ve kept in touch with a handful of Tribune friends. We’re still obsessed with the place, even if we don’t exactly miss it. “There are people who’ve served time in prison who talk about it less,” an old coworker likes to say.
It was the best experience we never want to have again. Which is why The Paper left me feeling nostalgic. It didn’t make me want to relive the grind. It just made me sad that those days are pretty much over.
