Because this is 1930s NYC, yellow journalism is sadly standard. You can’t do what I had initially attempted to do with my failed paper, which was to apply my 2025-era journalistic standards to News Tower. Especially in those early months, when every single dollar counts, you’re going to have to, for example, publish the exact stories that mobsters want you to publish, even if they’re outright lies. If you do this, they might give you an extra $500 (which will go a very long way, because it’s the ‘30s). And if you don’t, they might just show up at your office and give your employees a violent “talking-to” that will leave them too scared to work, or even result in broken equipment that you can’t afford to replace. Take it from me: embrace yellow journalism and become a mustache-twirling tycoon. It’s how News Tower works, and again, this is how it was back then.
News Tower embraces historical accuracy across the board, to impressive effect. Every single story that comes over your newsroom’s telegram service is a real news item from the time. As actual dates tick by on your editorial calendar, you’ll get to assign your reporters to cover major events that really happened, like Al Capone’s arrest (1931), or Babe Ruth’s called shot (1932). You’ll hire reporters and other employees based on their skills, while also keeping an eye on their salaries, which will increase as they become better at their jobs. You’ll have to balance all of that against producing a great paper once a week.
The historical accuracy aspect adds a delightful flavor to the game, but as a modern-day journalist, I do hope that anyone who plays News Tower understands that this version of journalism is not the norm today. If you have an ethical bone in your body, you’ll be angry to hear a wealthy socialite telling you to stop publishing political news because she’d rather not see the USA get involved in World War II. Luckily, the more you progress, the more factions and advertisers you’ll meet, and the more options you’ll have as to whose whims you cater towards each week. You’ll also, of course, still need to cater to the interests of your readers, who are paying customers as well; each neighborhood in NYC has different demographics and therefore different types of stories readers will gravitate towards.
In News Tower, the aim is to become a massive juggernaut of a news organization, so by the time you hit the mid-game, you’ll be actively competing with other newspapers, trying to poach their readers and put them out of business so that you can be the most important paper in town. The game does have an ending, but it also has an endless mode with news items and headlines that will no longer match up with the historical dates on the calendar. I loved watching history play out on my newspaper’s pages, and even the experience of role-playing as a wholly unethical editor-in-chief, all in the name of profit… which, I should say, is absolutely not the reason I got into journalism.
The story of my failed paper was also an interesting one, although News Tower doesn’t have an actual “game over” screen (or at least, not that I saw). As my loans’ interest kept stacking up and I kept on nobly refusing to do the mafia’s bidding, I started selling off as many extraneous office supplies as I could. I sold the plants off employees’ desks; I sold the clocks on the walls. I did layoffs, which really just meant my paper ran fewer stories and they took longer to do, thereby ensuring my subscriber base would dwindle ever further. I crammed my few remaining employees onto one floor so that I could sell the lights on the remaining floors and keep them dark. And as I did all of this, my employees’ happiness levels plummeted; they started doing sloppy reporting, working slower and slower. My paper’s quality was so terrible, and my loans’ interest climbing so high, that it soon became clear I had dug a hole out of which I could never climb. And in those final moments, I remembered what it was like to work at the Boston Phoenix all the way up until it closed in 2013—the layoffs, the cutbacks, and even the day that all of us had to move our desks to cram into a much smaller space because the rest of the office was getting rented out to someone else.
In the case of the Boston Phoenix, which was a free weekly paper that made money from selling classified ads, the rise of the internet and Craigslist was its undoing. But the Phoenix kept its integrity to the end. In News Tower, my failed paper did, too. Even though my reporters’ work got sloppy, I saw it as my own fault; I had sold off everything, even their desk plants. I had to make serious ethical compromises in order to run a successful paper in News Tower, and so I did—and I had a wonderful time doing it, because that’s how this game is designed. It rewards you for giving in to the whims of the rich and powerful, and as with any well-constructed management sim, it feels fantastic to watch the numbers go up.
Although I’ve been assuring the reader that no modern newspaper would ever operate this way, I must also concede that the wealthy can and do still influence news, and what’s more, it’s now much easier to make fake news that looks very real. Because people no longer are used to paying for news, as they were in the ‘30s, it’s even harder to fund accurate, ethical news. And so, even though News Tower is very specifically set in a time period that’s different from our own, it’s a reflection of how recent it was that our newsstands were full of fakery. As people faced devastating economic circumstances and did their best to ignore Hitler’s rise to power, perhaps they could have used some more accurate newspapers in their hands, but that’s not what they had. And right now, that’s not really what we have, either, but that’s mostly because newspapers barely exist at all.
News Tower is not such a throwback, then, that it doesn’t still feel surprisingly meaningful and—in my case, at least—stressful and even upsetting in how accurate its reflection of news tycoonery can be. I can only hope that the modern newsperson finds some way to get the truth into people’s hands without having to make all of these compromises. But just like my protagonist in News Tower, I don’t know of any way that such a thing could be done.
