For the column of the lines of this week, Jon Allsop replaces Jay Caspian Kang.
At the beginning of “The Paper”, a new series of peacock mocks which follows the staff of the TruthfulA fictitious newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, viewers are shown a grainy flash-back at the height of the institution, in 1971: the editorial hall is lively, and the publisher boasts of its foreign offices and a recent history which obtained a third of the municipal council charged with RIB-Dessous charges. Nowadays, it is clear that the Truthful is in good shape. Its staff is tiny and shares a floor with Softees, a brand of toilet paper – and a more lucrative company – attached by the same parent company, Enervat. Mare pritti (Chelsea Frei), the composer who brings together the newspaper, brings together stories in the mind of a warning. (“Elizabeth Olsen reveals its night skin routine”; “UV nail lamps cause hand -make melanoma but not with these 12 tips”.) “Enervat sells paper products,” said a frame named Ken (played by the excellent British actor Tim Key). “It could be office supplies, it could be concierge paper – which is toilet fabrics, protectors of toilet seats – and local newspapers. And it is in order of quality. “
Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the TruthfulThe new editor -in -chief of Peppy. He studied journalism at the university, but then decided to take safer jobs by selling high -end cardboard, for his father’s business and hygienic paper, for Enervat, and only launched into the news sector. “When I was a child, I didn’t want to be Superman,” said Ned. “I wanted to be Clark Kent, because Clark is the real superhero. He also saves the world by working in a newspaper. ” NED intends to revive the Truthful By hiring new people to make original reports in town and cutting “nonsense of garbage baits”. Ken gives him a short recovery. “Strong is Tom Brady,” he says. “Very healthy, very rich. Truthful is a sick mouse hides behind Tom Brady’s refrigerator. Now, Tom Brady, he loves mice. But this mouse is fucked. Ned must be satisfied with the staff he already has.
“The Paper” takes place in the same universe as the American version of “The Office”, but, as my colleague Inkoo Kang suggested it in his examination of the program this week, he could have more in common with “Parks and Recreation”, which also revolves around a distribution of eccentrics on a civic mission, in this case in a department of local parks, in Indiana. Greg Daniels, who co -created the three shows, said that the editorial room was attractive because newspapers play a vital democratic role but in the increasingly disastrous strait – zombified by unscrupulous owners who come and cut journalism to the bone. “The Paper” highlights “people who have been a little beaten,” he said The envelope. “It seemed that the mission is so great, and it is such a thing that the characters are inspired by someone who enters and says:” Let’s really do it and do like that. Alex Edelman, a writer of the series who also plays Adam, an accountant Dopy, described him more and more comfortable, at the Boston GlobeLike “a love letter to local newspapers”.
Indeed, the show addresses many of the challenges facing local journalism: business consolidation, the rise of creators of individual content, the tyranny of the online comments section. In the end, the comic gain often comes from the fact that the Truth of the dike The work is not very good – a bait and a curious change, if the show really aspires to prove the value of obstinate ethical responsibility relationships. This does not mean, however, that “the newspaper” fails as “a love letter to local newspapers”. It is one of these, in a surprisingly literal sense.
I obtained my first major signature in 2017, in what could be the oldest newspaper published permanently in America, the Hartford Fluent. History, a survey focused on people who won Connecticut’s state lottery with an improbable frequency, began as a journalism project that I developed with two veterans journalists. It was a heavy washing, which involved analyzing sets of data few handling, browsing the judicial files and driving for days to knock on the doors of the subjects. It was the kind of ambitious swing that local newspapers should take. Some still do it. But these days, many local newspapers, such as pre-born Truthfulare filled with metallic copy and, according to data from Northwestern, the United States has lost more than a third of its newspapers in the past two decades. In 2020, the Fluent closed his physical office; The following year, it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a financial company whose name is a word, in journalism circles, for the reduction of aggressive costs.
In “The Paper”, as in real life, local writing rooms are always capable of hard -hitting work; In a scene, NED has a video call with the editor -in -chief of an energetic article in Cincinnati, which is coded as an intimidating competent. But the call is intended to underline a contrast to the Truthful—Ded take it while wearing an exfoliating blue face mask as part of an allocation of product revision on the scale of the editorial room, a brand of journalism that its Cincinnati counterpart rejects as “lame”. It is far from being the only time when the TruthfulTrembling standards are played for laughter. In the second episode, when Ned asks his neophyte staff if he has newspaper writing experience, he replied that he wrote tweets. They then come out in disastrous reporting assignments which lead, variously, an accident, an arrest and a story invented on an supposed craze in which people claim to be dogs.
