Newsrooms offer plenty of fodder for nuanced comedy

Opinion

When I heard that the new Office sequel series recently picked up by Peacock is going to be focused on “a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters,” I had whatever the German word is for “this feels a little too close to home.”

I mean, I also work at a historic Midwestern newspaper — one that’s very much alive, thank you very much; no, I mean literally thank you, your subscriptions matter — but the prognosis of my industry has been terminal since I started in it 18 years ago.

Newsrooms have been gutted, newspapers have shuttered, great swaths of North America are now news deserts. And yet, there seems to be a real demand for content about journalism. This comes in a lot of forms: true crime podcasts, which, let’s be honest, are often just rip-and-reads from the newspaper; prestige films focused on big, important newsrooms breaking big, important stories (She Said, Spotlight, The Post); TV dramas (The Newsroom, Season 5 of The Wire).

But as a great fan of the 1940 screwball rom-com His Girl Friday and the all-time-great ‘90s sitcom NewsRadio (Joe Rogan’s presence notwithstanding), I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more newsroom-set workplace comedies — particularly ones set at newspapers. Magazines, our more glamorous counterparts, tend to be overrepresented in rom-coms.

Sure, this biz we call news is ripe for ripped-from-the-headlines-we-wrote drama, but there are so many quirks about a newspaper newsroom that lend well to comedy. For one, papers generally attract the kind of people other people describe as “a real character.” Two, we’re writers, so naturally our one-liners are sharp, acerbic and, more often than not, as black as the ink we buy by the barrel.

What we do isn’t a joke, obviously. We’re composing the first drafts of history to deadline at vanishing papers of record. We’re telling stories that need to be heard.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing about how AI could do our jobs and how “no one reads the paper anymore.” When people complain about paywalls and subscription costs, what we hear is “your work isn’t worth anything to us.”

It’s easy to take a defensive posture, is what I’m saying. I’ve taken it, too. This is a serious business and we take our work seriously, but I wonder, sometimes, if we journalists take ourselves a bit too seriously.

I’ve seen concerns that the premise of the new Office will punch below the fold, as it were, that it will treat newspapers as some antiquated relic we don’t need anymore. Others are concerned about the fact that the staff populating the new Office are volunteers.

“Here is what I am afraid of: this show becomes one of those Bad News Bears scenarios where a ragtag group of nobodies Mighty Ducks their way into an industry where they have no knowledge or skill but a lot of passion, and wind up showing those big-city yahoos that they don’t need all that expertise! All they need is heart! They don’t even need money!” writes Baltimore Banner columnist Leslie Gray Streeter.

These are fair (and hilariously made) points. Journalism costs money. Skilled reporters should be compensated — though I don’t believe volunteers lack skill simply because they are volunteers. And listen, journalism school is all well and good, but everything useful I ever learned about this profession came from actually doing it. That, and sitting within earshot of a harrumphing copy editor.

But also, aren’t newspapers famously where ragtag groups of passionate nobodies become somebodies? And isn’t that where comedy lives?

On X, reporters current and former were sharing stories from their newsrooms that could work as potential Office storylines. I laughed in recognition at the deadline mishaps, the characters, the one-liners and the lore. Sorry, I’m saving my newspaper stories for my memoir, What, Slow News Day? Tales of a Lifestyle Columnist.

I’m optimistic that the new Office will balance humour and heart, just as its predecessor did. I don’t know if it will inspire people to subscribe to their local newspapers, but I hope it at least makes them reflect on all we lose when we allow our historic newspapers to die. Rarely does a comedy exist without some tragedy.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com