From NBCUniversal:

American Wire listed some Twitter reactions:

Let me guess: the main theme will be about how reporters aren’t Leftwing enough!

They could just as well have picked NYT or Wapo, and not a “dying Midwestern town.” It’s not the geographic region that’s relevant—it’s the fact that the entire corrupt industry is dying.

That’s the most depressing premise I’ve ever heard, mostly because it’s too true to life. The death of print journalism is funny, let’s watch them convulse?

so basically a true story of journalism in 2024?

If you can’t find enough programming to keep from re-making a re-make, then maybe you don’t need to exist as a streamer.

my immediate take (and not being in the writers room so what do I know!): there’s comedic gold in adhering more closely to reality rather than this “volunteer reporter” idea (like 3 local reporters making like 30k a year trying to do the work that 20 people used to do).

Evidently the last commenter has not heard of the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center created by the late Thomson Newspapers chain. And in the wake of the Great Recession media outlets were seeking stories without offering pay. (For that matter well before that I was told I shouldn’t get paid for broadcasting games at one radio station, which ended my work at that radio station.)

The response does reflect reality:

I had one day where I covered an arson fire, a solid waste management meeting and a high school softball game. Then got yelled at by the publisher for claiming mileage.

I’m not sure who would find that funny besides people still working in the news media. Imagine the humor of getting hired at a job where you have no employee benefits other than mileage (which was reduced to $5 per week because, you guessed it, I was driving too much) and vacation (one week after one year). I also heard of a media outlet — I forgot if it was a weekly newspaper or small radio station — that would pay mileage to the event, but not back, on the logic that the employee would be going back to the office or home anyway.

The crazy part about this is you might think that publishers (who usually come from the sales side) would retire wealthy upon selling their newspapers. I can think of four publishers, two of whom I worked for, who sold out to bigger companies. All four didn’t live very long after retiring — from less than 20 years to one year. I don’t think any of the four got what most people other than their former employers got “rich” by selling out.

The economic model of small-town businesses, which includes weekly newspapers, has always involved smaller amounts of money than those unfamiliar with newspapers might believe. For decades two-thirds of newspaper revenues came from their advertisers, mostly retail. You can imagine what happened when the retail advertising base started to erode with changes in business. That, however, doesn’t mean subscribers have been willing to pick up the financial slack. And to this day few media outlets have been able to figure out how to handle the Internet and make money off it.

Another Facebook Friend (who is the wife of an actual friend of mine) is sure it won’t be funny because in the woke era nothing is funny. The irony may be that over my career I have gotten to know a lot of people, both in the media and those on the other end of notebooks and microphones, who would be funny to portray. But a lot of them, particularly those who get their paychecks from the media, would be too politically incorrect (not necessarily due to their politics but due to their personal quirks) to portray today.