Heroes and Scoundrels — that’s the title of a 2015 book that examines the representation of journalists in popular culture. Looking at movies, television, plays, novels and comics, authors Joe Saltzman and Matthew Ehrlich suggest that the image of journalists often veers between very good and very bad.

Journalists are either impossibly virtuous and noble or shamefully scurrilous and self-serving. They’re either public servants or a public menace.

Recently, however, with the economic pressures on legacy journalism, the decline of local outlets, and the rise of misinformation and disinformation amid a new media universe, we’ve seen the development of a new pop-culture category, a kind of beleaguered, in-between classification that views journos as a little hapless, a bit hopeless and just barely hanging on.

That’s certainly the vibe you get with the new mockumentary comedy series The Paper (currently streaming on StackTV), in which the sweetly peppy, impossibly earnest Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) struggles to turn around a dying newspaper in the American Midwest.