Column: You think your office is a sitcom? I worked at Toledo's Blade

Standing against a wall of a dark basement bar in Toledo, a shout away from the Maumee River, I turned to a reporter at my left, a staffer at The Blade, Toledo’s daily newspaper, my journalism alma mater. I asked him: Does this seem, you know, like The Blade? “One hundred percent,” he whispered, turning back to the flatscreen on the wall. We were watching the new Peacock sitcom “The Paper,” set at a once mighty, now struggling Toledo newspaper, loosely inspired by The Blade.

A chunk of the newsroom staff slipped in after their shifts to nurse pale ales and catch the premiere. On screen, a new editor, played by Domhnall Gleeson, was saying inspiring things to his young and underpaid, inexperienced staff. They were going to rebuild the newsroom of the Toledo Truth Teller, the fictional ne