YMMV / The Paper

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • McDougal being The Paranoiac is played for comedy. Randy Quaid would, years later, make headlines for his bizarre behavior claiming that a global conspiracy was trying to assassinate him.
  • The film presents a David-and-Goliath scenario in Henry's scrappy tabloid versus a stuffy major newspaper. In modern times, journalism is in a crisis due to the preponderance of fly-by-night sources of misinformation, while providers of quality, reliable and investigative journalism have become The Last DJ. It's much harder for modern viewers to sympathize with Henry standing up for his principles by staying with a tabloid.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Nearly every scene in the film is evocative of a time before online news sources ate the heart of "old-guard" print-only publications:
  • The ending Bait-and-Switch, where one of the Sun's employees, Alicia, responds to a nurse asking to read her copy by telling her to "buy her own", seems remarkably quaint considering that just a few short years after this, said nurse could have already read the story online.
  • The editor Bernie White is allowed to smoke in his office, where he calls all of the head writers for their daily scrum, with only a single hypochondriac complaining. In modern times, offices are smoke-free environments for just about everyone.
  • Bernie complains that his newspaper has too many opinion columnists, which is either unintentionally dated or prescient. Newspapers and online news sites have increasingly relied on flashy and partisan opinion pieces to attract readers, which has degraded the overall quality of news.
  • Alicia does not run Henry's story because she couldn't reach him for two hours. In modern times, she could have just called his cell phone. She's shot while trying to make a call at a bar payphone. The only cell phone we do see is bulky and looks like a walkie-talkie.
  • A Running Gag is that the Sun staff will refuse to run any foreign news stories unless they directly involve, or were seen by, someone who lived in New York. The early 2000s would see online newsfeeds (not to mention standardization of major newspaper conglomerates) make it far easier — and to a certain degree, expected — for newspapers to run foreign news articles from international agencies as a way to fill page space, to such an extent that even major U.S. publishers like The New York Times have dabbled in running entire print sections comprised of nothing but said pieces.

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