By Karen Sternheimer
Back in 2008, I wrote a post called “A Modest Proposal to Save Journalism.” Almost two decades later, it has never been more critical to have an independent “fourth estate” but it probably won’t return in its previous form, due to political and economic pressures.
Case in point: the “Thursday night massacre” on June 4, 2026, at CBS’s 60 Minutes, where the executive producer and several correspondents were fired despite solid ratings. This was a sad moment in the storied program’s more than 50-year history. (See Scott Pelley’s powerful interview about being fired after 37 years with CBS News.) When the premier news program within what was once known as the “Tiffany network” was dismantled, it sent a message to all journalists that hard-hitting journalism could be censored if it offends those in power.
Within an otherwise gloomy climate, comes a mockumentary from the creators of The Office. The Paper presumably tracks down the old Dunder Mifflin paper company, which had been bought and absorbed by a paper company in Toledo, Ohio. The company’s primary sales engine is its toilet paper division. It also owns what is left of the local paper, the Toledo Truth Teller, which has only a few employees and focuses primarily on online clickbait and reposting Associated Press stories that are in their subscription tier.
The montage in the opening credits does a great job of detailing how for many people, newspaper is something you might use to wrap your valuables or line your pet’s cage with, but not something many people actually read. In the pilot episode, Nicole, who works in circulation, delivers perhaps the most profound line of the digital age when she says that the paper gets more information about readers (thanks to data mining) than readers get from the local paper.
Enter Ned, a young, privileged, idealist who gets hired to bring journalism back to the Truth Teller, but with no budget. With only one staffer with any journalism experience, the new editor-in-chief recruits the sales and accounting staff to cover local news, and hilarity ensues.
Behind the trademark absurdity we have come to expect from workplace comedies like this, we can see what happens when people try and learn to be journalists on the fly. They have such limited training that when a group of high school students comes in to tour the paper, one of the staffers ask if they can shadow the high school journalists someday.
The one experienced journalist on the staff is looking for more stable work in another industry, not sure that there’s a future at the paper. Her inclination isn’t wrong: a 2022 Georgetown University report found that just 15 percent of journalism majors work as editors or reporters. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 4 percent decline in journalism jobs over the next several years. Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that weekday U.S. newspaper circulation fell from over 60 million in 1973 to just an estimate 24 million in 2020. Pew estimates that advertising revenue plummeted by about 80 percent between 2005 and 2022, from more than 49 billion to under 10 billion dollars in 2022.
The news about local news is even worse. A 2025 Poynter Report estimated a 75 percent decline in local journalists since 2002. “More than a third of U.S. counties have fewer than the equivalent of one full time journalist,” the report notes. The absence of local news can have detrimental effects. There is less reporting on local politics and local weather. Cuts to local PBS and NPR stations mean that people in rural areas might not get vital weather emergency warnings.
The Paper humorously critiques what happens when journalism gives way to celebrity-based stories and clickbait-centered content. The show features the seemingly shallow managing editor Esmerelda, who is happy with the way things were and actively tries to sabotage her new editor-in-chief. They both get into a beef with a local teen blogger, who they view as a legitimate rival.
The absurdity of the situations the staff of the Toledo Truth Teller experience make for good comedy, but they also reflect a troubling reality of what happens when the work of being a journalist no longer pays. The majority of the Truth Teller’s staff are paid for their work in accounting or sales, and they are purely volunteer journalists, subsidized by the company’s toilet paper profits.
The ubiquity of information online might seem to replace the information that journalists provide, but it does not. Citizen journalism relies on unpaid volunteers to do work that historically has been full time. The question I asked in 2008 bears repeating in 2026: what can be done to save journalism?