“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” Those are the immortal words of Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) in the film Citizen Kane (1941), when writing to his guardian Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) about why he decided to start running the New York Inquirer. In the film, Kane uses the newspaper to build up his business empire, running a variety of scare stories and yellow journalism, and actively encouraging the Spanish-American War. In the end, Kane is forced to sell his newspaper holdings following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The crash of ‘29 is actually where News Tower’s tutorial starts, placing you in control of a failing New York paper (you can name it as you wish). News Tower emerges out of Early Access this month, having originally launched in February 2024.
From these humble beginnings, it’s your job to build up the weekly paper, designing the office, filling it with staff, and sending journalists out on assignment. As the newspaper grows, so does your building, allowing you to add additional floors, stairs and rooms. The management sim portion is divided between several tasks. Similar to something like Two Point Hospital, the first part is designing the layout of your newspaper office. You need desks for your journalists, but also typesetting and compositing desks where the paper is laid up. Similarly your staff will need adequate toilets, as well as food for when they’re on lunch break. They also want offices which are a good temperature and not too noisy, meaning you absolutely do not want them working alongside the printing presses.
Indeed, the belt-driven rotary printing press is a huge piece of equipment and each time you add an additional page to the paper, you’ll need to extend the belt mechanism to accommodate it. It generates a lot of heat and a lot of noise, so it’s best to wall it off in a room where only technicians will occasionally visit it to refill the paper stocks or make repairs. You can place vents and noise panels to help deal with the heat and the sound, although it’s impossible to completely mitigate. Finally, you’ll also want to decorate the office, partly to simply make it look nice but also to boost the mood of your employees, allowing them to work harder.
Once you’ve got all your staff hired, you then need to actually find stories to put into the paper. You do this by having someone listening in to the newswire (literally at this point, the telegraph/cabling service), which alerts to where stories might be developing. These start off being centred in New York itself or within the United States, but later on may spread across the globe. Once you get a line on a story, a journalist can be dispatched to cover it, who will then investigate the story. This can lead to further developments and you can decide to either keep investigating, potentially making the story more detailed and interesting, or just print the story as it is. There’s a trade off between wanting to thoroughly gather the news and making it to print on time, as the newspaper needs putting to bed every Sunday.
Once you have your stories, you then can arrange them in the paper, selecting the articles you think have the biggest impact and broadest appeal in the choice spots. You don’t get to write the headlines, but you do get to play around with the positioning. The stories are all pulled from real headline news from the 1930s; for example former President William Taft’s resignation from the Supreme Court in February 1930 (he died a month later), and of course the repeal of prohibition in 1933. Given you chose which stories to pursue, you may find yourself missing key news of the day if you fail to send a reporter to cover it. While the paper is ostensibly weekly, the nature of the time dilation means you publish one edition per month of in-game time, currently running until 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe.
Visually the cartoon animated style looks great and characters move in a kind of stick-figure manner which is quite charming. There are a number of narratives you can unlock as you gradually expand the distribution of the paper across the boroughs of New York and New Jersey, including various factions who you’ll have to decide whether to make nice with. These include the mayor’s office, Manhattan high society, and of course the Mafia. The extra narrative hooks help to add to the sense of building your own newspaper empire, since you’ll be encouraged to put editorial slants on stories, or even refrain from printing certain news in particular editions, with the promise of a fat reward for doing so.
The music is likewise great, a mixture of jazz and big band tunes which captures the spirit of the era wonderfully. It was recorded by real jazz musicians from the New Cool Collective and sounds appropriately authentic as a result. When your newspaper gets big enough it can be very satisfying to just watch all your reporters busily moving around, using the elevators or rushing the latest story to compositing. The balance between micromanagement and assembling the paper is broadly good, although it is very easy to go over budget early on, particularly if you over-expand the newspaper building before readership increases.
News Tower is a great amalgam of tried and tested management sim gameplay combined with the historical and narrative hooks of running a New York newspaper through the turbulent decade of the 1930s. Upon release from early access, the game will have been significantly expanded to include competitor newspapers who will vie with you for dominance, as well as leaderboards for those chasing becoming the most successful newspaper business in history. If this game is anything to go by, Citizen Kane was right; it is fun to run a newspaper.
