Why Paperboy is a symbol of modern journalism's decline

Paperboy (1985 / 1988)

Paperboy (1985 / 1988)

I’m sorry, but have you used the Internet lately? You go onto a website these days, and you’re lucky if you can actually see any of the content. All of the GDPR Suits are in your face with notices, asking you for your cookies. What? Those are my cookies, you hungry fools, so get your own.

You also get the feeling that allowing all cookies on a website is something you really should be taking more notice of, like the app permissions on your phone. When you go online, click “Accept All” at your peril, because when your credit card details get harvested, milked for quite literally all you’re worth, your financial assailant will be perfectly entitled to point out that you gave them the permission to do it.

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Once you get past all of this information hoarding and onto the website itself, things get worse. I don’t really bother following the news these days, for many reasons really, but chief among them is how desperately poor the news sites have become. The title of the piece will be complete clickbait anyway, but I can understand that - headlines have always been designed to grab your attention by teasing a juicy story.

Go online though, and when the unskippable video ad has finished and the libellous, AI-written piece begins, you’re lucky if you can even tell what you’re supposed to be looking at - there’ll be a paragraph, then an ad. Then another paragraph, then an ad. Then a paragraph that repeats something that’s already been said before, but worded slightly differently.

Then the news site will completely undermine themselves by featuring Twitter reactions from nobodies, as a way of getting “reactions” and inciting a bit of hate, because hate sells even better than sex. Then, yet more ads.

Now, I know the tabloids are desperate for any online revenue they can get - I’m in my thirties and I’ve bought maybe five newspapers in my life, so there’s not much future in print journalism - but there are some ways these news corps can help themselves, and removing auto-play videos is just one of them.

I suppose that’s still a slightly better approach than what the broadsheets and other “esteemed organs” do: they try to hit you with a paywall, after you’ve read the first five words of an article. Paywalls are easy for anyone with a bit of online nous to get around, of course, but nothing makes me lose interest and close a tab as fast as a paywalled article.

But then, isn’t good journalism worth paying for? The problem is, that logic cuts both ways - and news outlets are perfectly happy to pay several of their contributors nothing at all for their words. Nothing about a paywalled, ad-ridden, toxic news site with articles written by hacks and a severe political axe to grind, nothing about all that makes me want to buy a paper or subscribe to the Guardian anytime soon.

I’m probably just bitter really, as I once did an interview with the local paper, which never featured in the end, and I’ve hated modern journalism ever since. Mind you, in the days before online journalism, getting the news out there was a lot more difficult, and in all of this, we cannot forget the humble paperboy.

Do paperboys still exist? Is it still a viable trade, young boys carrying backbreaking stacks of papers around town? I truly wish I could have had a paper round as a boy. Not for the wages obviously; average pay for a paperboy back in the 1950s was tuppence-ha’penny a day, whatever that means. It’s just that when I write about a video game, I like to go method, which helps gives my almost-journalistic piece a bit more meaning and credibility.

As it is though, and with no personal experience as a paperboy to draw on, I’ll just have to do my best to get fully immersed in 1985’s Paperboy, the most realistic paperboy simulator around at the time. The game was available for… pretty much every device that electricity could power, really, but I own the NES version so we’ll check that one out.

Before even starting though, I find it wild that there was a whole video game, and a very popular one at that, devoted to a now-extinct profession. Was there a Commodore 64 game about lamplighters, maybe? Atari games about wagon painters? If there were, I bet they were more fun than Paperboy. I bloody hate this game, you know. Everything about it, from the isometric camera angle to the ugly graphics to the rubbish controls, it all really winds me up.

Here’s the premise - you star as the underpaid, exploited, thick little boy, up and out of the house earlier than literally everyone else. You are tasked with riding your bike down some Podunk street and throwing propaganda rags at houses.

Ideally, you’d get the papers nicely nestled inside their letterboxes, but what usually happens is that the boy will summon Herculean strength and launch the papers right through the residents windows instead, complete with a surprisingly well-rendered glass breaking sound effect. That’s a lawsuit up the ass right there, as the local townsfolk would say. And how many court cases for criminal destruction could a paperboy financially sustain?

You will have bigger problems than that, though. I was actually wrong to say that the paperboy is awake before everyone, so you can consider this a printed correction, I meant no confusion or harm, will do better in future to maintain journalistic integrity, etc etc.

In actual fact, by the time your slovenly boy takes to the streets for a day’s work, it’s all happening: there are dogs running around, men out on the sidewalk trying to put their trousers on. Or off. Or maybe they’re breakdancing, we’re not talking about extremely detailed graphics here.

In several instances, there are two blokes moving a sheet of glass up and down the street, a classic gag. There’s girls out hula-hooping, which mightn't sound so scary, but don’t forget that cooties is the number one killer of paperboys in America, so you’d better take notice.

But equally as terrifying as cooties, and ever-present on this wretched street, is the Grim Reaper himself. You know your luck’s not in when Death is waiting to get you on a friendly neighborhood corner. But hey, what can you expect when you take a bike out onto the road? It’s always been the quickest way to make yourself a target.

There’s a badly made dirtbike bonus level as well, and probably some other Easter eggs, but you really won’t get more than 10 minutes out of this one. To avoid any spurious defamation and libel claims, I suppose I should say that Paperboy the game is a classic, fun, quirky little title that everyone can enjoy. Off the record though, this game is a pain in the arse.

Picture a news outlet with an insulting paywall that wants all your cookies. Then it serves you nothing but clickbait that never actually gives you the answer, written by a smug journalist giving only one side of the story. And typos, loads and loads of typos. That's what this game is, essentially. Needless to say, apart from a wretched N64 sequel, Paperboy hasn’t been seen since. And even if it did, like newspapers themselves, it wouldn’t be a piece worth paying for.

18 July 2025